


Trail of Embers

by MirrorMystic



Category: Shadowrun, Shadowrun: Dragonfall
Genre: Action, Blood, Demonic Possession, Drama, F/F, Gen, Human Sacrifice, Mind Control, Occasional fluff, Tarot
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-01
Updated: 2017-05-02
Packaged: 2018-10-13 11:45:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 32,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10513119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MirrorMystic/pseuds/MirrorMystic
Summary: The Flux State has fallen, and the Kreuzbasar with it. Scattering in the wake of Lofwyr’s corporate takeover, Aljernon Half-Dream leaves Glory a gift: a compass, and a clue- to follow the trail of embers to the one crowned in fire.Now Glory hunts for Harrow in a bloody trail across Europe, to face her demons in more ways than one. And she won't hunt alone...





	1. Who Carries the Flame

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tamoline](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tamoline/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Of Glories Past and Present](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8318875) by [Tamoline](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tamoline/pseuds/Tamoline). 



> For Tamoline, who wrote Glory the happy ending she deserved, and for inspiring me to write the less-than-happy road that got her there. I hope you all enjoy the read.

~*~  
  
It was a beautiful day in the woods. The sun was shining. The birds were singing. The boss was locked up in the cabin and said not to be disturbed under any circumstances. That worked just fine for David Wen, gun-for-hire, who was free to stand out on the patio and enjoy the weather.  
  
There were worse ways to spend an afternoon, David figured. Especially when he was being paid 300 nuyen a day just to take in the country air.  
  
David was a mage- barely. He knew just enough to save himself from sitting through a twelve-hour first-aid course, and a couple of parlor tricks, ice breakers at the bar. Nothing too fancy. It wasn’t his magic that paid the bills. Still, his family saw his Awakening as some kind of sign- that he was “born lucky”.  
  
On a nice day like today, an easy 300 nuyen in his pocket, David could almost believe it.  
  
“Hey, skinny,” a gruff voice called out beside him.  
  
The company left something to be desired, though. David sighed.  
  
David looked up from his spot, leaning forward on the patio rail. A man lumbered up to him. He was huge, a human with a troll’s build, and he cradled a heavy autocannon in his arms.  David tried, and failed, to remember his name. But then, he didn’t try too hard.  
  
“That’s a nice gun,” the big guy said, jerking his head to where David’s rifle lay propped up against the railing.  
  
“Thanks,” David muttered.  
  
“‘Course, I like mine better,” he grinned, patting the side of his autocannon. “Now _this_ is a gun.”  
  
“I like spending my pay on _more_ than ammunition, thanks,” David rolled his eyes. “You’ll burn through your cut in a three-second pull of that trigger.”  
  
The giant’s eyes glinted with malice. His lips pulled into a grin.  
  
“That’s big talk for a scrawny little leaf-eater,” the brute said. “You sure you can even lift that gun, arms like yours?”  
  
David exhaled, turning and looking out across the dirt trail leading away from the cabin. This was a conversation he wasn’t going to have.  
  
“Hey, I’m talking to you, _elf_ ,” the brute spat, eyes fixed on the tapered points of David’s ears. “Is it true what they say about knife-ears like you?”  
  
David seethed, but refrained from asking just what it was ‘they’ said about elves. He searched for something to focus on besides a racist tirade, settling on the autocannon in the man’s arms. He exhaled, feeling his vision slip into astral space.  
  
The world shifted around him, the vibrant colors of the surrounding woods fading into shapes and shadows, each leaf, each blade of grass only glimmering with the faint light of life. People, meanwhile, exploded into scintillating color.  
  
This, aside from some healing ability and a handful of parlor tricks, was the extent of David’s magical ability. He could read auras, see the memory of objects if he really tried. At the moment, he was seeing the history of the man’s autocannon unfold in wireframe outlines of golden light, tracing it back to the card game where he’d won it, with one lucky hand.  
  
A shadow flickered past, out in the trees. David caught a glimpse of it, distracted for a moment, before turning back to the brute in front of him-  
  
-and the very real red spot hovering over his heart.  
  
David dropped flat onto the patio, his belt buckle thudding into the wooden deck. His vision snapped back into realspace, as he craned his neck and hunted the treeline for the sniper…  
  
Laughter pealed out from down the patio, and an embarrassed flush ran across David’s cheeks. He slowly got to his feet and dusted himself off, glowering at the mercenary in the rocking chair at the end of the deck, pocketing a keychain laser light and having a good laugh at David’s expense.  
  
“That’s not funny,” David grumbled, returning to his spot on the railing. “What if we were actually under attack?”  
  
“Please,” the man said, leaning back in his chair and crossing his hands behind his head. A cut-down shotgun lay casually across his lap. “I _wish_ somebody was actually gunning for us. Maybe it’d finally give us something to _do_.”  
  
“It’d be something to shoot at, at least,” added the giant to David’s right.  
  
“Lighten up, guy,” the merc to David’s left said, nodding at him. “We’re just killin’ time. I think we’re just antsy ‘cuz this gig’s such a sausagefest. Wish there were some women around.”  
  
“It’d be something to _shoot_ at, at least,” leered the brute.  
  
David groaned in disgust, his chin sinking onto his crossed arms. He looked out into the woods again, spacing out, casually slipping into the bright lights and charcoal grays of astral space.  
  
Once again, a shadow on the edge of his vision caught his eye, this time with a hint of green. It was there for a moment, and gone just as quickly.  
  
He heard a shuffle of boots on the deck beside him, and realspace shimmered back into focus.  
  
“Look alive,” the merc with the shotgun was saying, nodding at the trail. “Here comes the sarge.”  
  
Out of the four of them, Sergeant Castor was the oldest, and carried himself with the strict air of the military, although David could only wonder if he was actually a sergeant. Everyone just called him ‘the sarge’, and gave him the respect due their seniors- which, considering the two meatheads David got saddled with, often wasn’t much.  
  
“Grimes,” Castor said, nodding at the hulk with the autocannon. His eyes flicked to the others. “Wen. Simmons. What’s your status?”  
  
“What do you know, Sarge?” Simmons shrugged. “It’s _all clear_. Just like last time we checked. Just like it’s been _all week_.”  
  
“Well stay frosty, gentlemen,” Castor said. “The boss is meeting a very important client today. It is imperative that he not be disturbed.”  
  
“Whatever you say, sarge,” Simmons said.  
  
“A word, Wen?” Castor asked. He jerked his head, and David followed.  
  
“Hey Sims,” he heard the brute whisper as he went down the steps.  
  
“What?”  
  
“What’s ‘imperative’ mean?”  
  
“Man, shut up, Grimes.”  
  
David joined the sergeant in the field leading up to the cabin, out of earshot of the two mercenaries on the porch. It felt uncomfortably intimate; David hadn’t really interacted with the other guns-for-hire on this job. He’d been more than happy to stay on the porch, watch the trail, and tune out everything else.  
  
“You wanted to speak to me, sir?” David began, adjusting the rifle strap on his shoulder.    
  
“Mr. Wen,” Castor said. “...I hope those two numbskulls haven’t been giving you a hard time.”  
  
“Oh,” David said dumbly. He shuffled, awkward. “...No, sir.”  
  
“Well, good,” Castor continued. “Mercenaries should know that money speaks louder than metatype, or however that saying goes. Listen, son, it might be boring out in the countryside, but a job is a job. Best case, everything’s quiet, and we get paid without firing a shot. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take this seriously. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be professional…”  
  
A red dot appeared on the sergeant’s chest. David glared up the hill at Simmons on the patio, but Simmons wasn’t looking at him. And the angle was off…  
  
Castor’s lecture went on. The red dot lingered on his chest.  
  
“Sir-” David began.  
  
Castor’s chest exploded in a spatter of gore. Hemmed in by trees, the high-powered revolver shot, at close-range, was deafeningly loud.  
  
David spun, catching the glint of sunlight on metal. He drew his sidearm and fired, the sound of his pistol shot echoed by the booming roar of his attacker’s. Pain flashed up his arm as the shot slapped his gun out of his hand. A moment’s satisfaction flickered through his head when he saw the attacker’s pistol shot from their grasp. A mutual disarming.  
  
Lucky shot. Born lucky.  
  
David didn’t feel too lucky right now.  
  
A dreadful buzzing filled the air. David threw himself to the side as Grimes’ autocannon chugged to life, shredding the grass underfoot and shearing a ragged line through the trees. David watched as Simmons scrambled to his feet, bringing his shotgun up to his shoulder.  
  
Their assailant charged through the hail of bullets, a blur of movement at the edge of David’s vision.  
  
They pounced on Grimes, perching on his autocannon like a cat. They punched one cybernetic fist into Grimes’ chest, the other forming a beak with steel fingers and plunging into Grimes’ throat. They uncoiled their legs and leapt off of Grimes, tearing out his larynx and his heart in one gruesome, yet graceful move. The leap carried them over Simmons’ shotgun blast, his attack coming an instant too late. The blast tore a third, ragged chunk out of Grimes’ miserable form, slapping his ruined body flat onto the patio. The assailant landed behind Simmons and clutched his neck and jaw in their cybernetic hands. In one brutally efficient motion, they wrenched his head to one side and ripped to the other, breaking his neck and tearing out his throat for good measure.  
  
All this, in the time it took for David to take aim.  
  
There was an appalling amount of red, in the air, in the ground, but David didn’t see it. He shouldered his rifle, vision slipping into astral space, reflexively using the bright lure of the assailant’s soul to draw his aim like a red dot sight-  
  
-but he didn’t see a soul.  
  
He saw a hole in the world where a person should be, with a single green flame at its heart.  
  
A shadow.  
  
A ghost.  
  
They slammed into him with superhuman force, pinning his back to a tree. The jarring impact snapped his vision out of astral space and back to reality, replacing the phantom, the _demon_ -  
  
-with a girl. A girl with long, dark hair and eerie, crimson eyes.  
  
A girl who had one cyber-arm clamped around his throat, and the other reared back, claws out, ready to strike.  
  
David cringed, the last ten seconds flashing across his eyes. Castor. Grimes. Simmons. Three people dead in scarcely an eyeblink. Hell, he didn’t even _like_ them, but to see them torn apart like _that_ …  
  
David was shaking. Frightened tears spilled down his cheeks.  
  
The girl stared at him with dark eyes, rimmed in red, her pale skin painted with blood.  
  
“Please,” he begged, choking the word out past her cybernetic grip. “Please.”  
  
She cocked her head, as if listening to something only she could hear. The claws on her raised hand slid back into her fingers with a mechanical whir.  
  
Her other hand remained locked around his throat. David stared at her, choking, pleading. He blinked, and his vision shifted back into astral space, revealed the shadow pinning him to the tree, a phantom with a wisp of green fire where its heart should be.  
  
Reality reasserted itself, and he was staring at her again, taking in her eyes, her face, her bulky, antique cyber-arms, her torso, bare but for a strip of cloth-  
  
David cringed, screwing his eyes shut. Stupidly, he hoped she didn’t think he was looking at her chest. It was an inane thought, but it rode the terror in his veins. With her fingers around his throat, all it took would be one twitch, one silent command, and those claws would-  
  
She let him go.  
  
David took a grateful breath, realizing that terror had stretched one moment into what felt like minutes. In reality, one moment ago- one _minute_ ago- he was…  
  
His vision blurred, and he wobbled on his feet. He braced his back against the tree, steadying himself. He watched the girl silently retrieve her fallen revolver and slip it back into its holster.  
  
Curiosity got the better of him. He blinked, and once more he saw her in astral space, a long-haired silhouette, tattered and ghost-like, with a core held together by green fire and the faintest scent of honeysuckle. There was something in that flame… antlers… a skull-  
  
David flinched away from the image as if slapped.  
  
“What,” he said, hoarse, before he could stop himself. “What _are_ you?”  
  
Irritation, even anger, flashed across the girl’s features. David didn’t have time to wonder if he’d struck a nerve. She struck him first, with her boot, square in his chest, and kicked him into a tree. David hit the wood with a crack, and blacked out.    
  
~*~  
  
The hunting lodge was modest by any standards- couch and fireplace on the first floor, bedrooms up top. Although, this lodge, at least, had tastefully foregone a bearskin rug or framed deer heads on the walls.  
  
Glory burst into the room, smashing the front door to kindling. Sticky, congealing blood dripped down her face, her torso, and hung in ropes from her cyber-arms.  
  
There was no cry of terror, no shout of alarm, no hail of gunfire or magical wards. There was only the swinging of a back door left ajar, and the sound of an engine rumbling to life.  
  
Glory swore and ran to the window, her aching limbs protesting every step of the way. She pulled her PDA from her pocket and snapped a holopic of the car retreating down the trail.  
  
“Damn it,” Glory muttered, her face impassive as always.  
  
Briefly, she considered chasing it on foot. She might have even caught it, if she hadn’t burned her adrenal pump to avoid getting shredded by a heavy autocannon.  
  
Her cybernetic adrenal pump was implanted in the base of her spine, right by her kidneys, and the access panel stretching across the small of her back was as close to a tattoo as she would ever get. Glory could feel it running hot, could feel the momentary surge of speed and pain tolerance fade back into reality.  
  
Glory sank into a wooden armchair, feeling the weight and stiffness of her limbs reassert themselves. Every high came with a crash, and that included adrenaline.  
  
Glory took a moment to catch her breath, before pulling herself up to the desk before her and plugging in her PDA. Even though her mark escaped, her consolation prize was his terminal, left unprotected in his haste to get away. Glory watched the stream of data as it was copied to her PDA. Names, addresses, dates, project plans. From what she could tell, this particular cell was brand new- not even into the recruitment stage. Scaring off their would-be leader before he could get any acolytes nipped this cell in the bud- but, of course, Glory would’ve preferred pulling the weed out by the roots.  
  
Fatigue began setting in. Not the simple fatigue that one minute of bloody mayhem would leave in your limbs, but a deeper, older fatigue, one that settled in Glory’s chest and made her ache. She closed her eyes and let the memories flick past, single frames on a movie screen.  
  
Berlin. The Kreuzbasar. Her old team. Her old flame.  
  
_You made your choice._ _  
__  
_ The voice came to her on the breeze, along with the scent of honeysuckle and freshly tilled soil. Glory got up and pointedly pulled the back door shut.  
  
She crossed over to the terminal, where her PDA had finished downloading. She hit a key and wiped the local copy. Then, as an afterthought, she dumped the cell’s stockpiled funds into her own account. Business expense.  
  
Glory disconnected her PDA and tucked it away safely, rising to her feet. She knew she should leave, but she lingered in the cabin, nonetheless.  
  
She found herself drawn to the fireplace, logs crackling away. There were no hunting trophies mounted on the wall above- only a banner.  
  
Black antlers on a white field, cradling a red flame like a torch.  
  
Anger flashed across Glory’s eyes. She tore down the flag and stuffed it into the fireplace with a grimace, kicking up a cloud of embers. She leaned on the mantelpiece, staring down at the fire. Slowly, she closed her eyes and rested her forehead on the stone.  
  
Another day, another cell. Another target. But somehow, her real target managed to stay one step ahead.  
  
Despite standing before a fireplace, Glory could only feel the cold.  
  
She was so tired.  
  
_How long can you keep this up?_  
  
Glory’s eyes snapped open, the voice hissing in her ear. Something in the flag, some chemical, had tinged the fire an acid green. She pressed her lips into a line.  
  
“As long as it takes.”  
  
Glory pulled a compass from her pocket, glinting in the emerald firelight. The engraving on its cover could have been a flame, or a rose. Inside, the arrow pointed down the trail leading behind the cabin, the one they’d driven down.  
  
The trail. There was always a trail.  
  
She had a holopic of the car they were driving. She had a list of members and addresses on her PDA. But more than anything, she had the compass, and with it, she always knew the way.  
  
The words came to her lips, an echo of the vow she took in a ruined city, now almost a full year ago.  
  
Her prayer. Her mantra.  
  
“Follow the trail of embers to the one crowned in fire,” Glory said. “Find him. Bring him to justice. No matter what it takes.”  
  
~*~  
  
David staggered into his apartment with a groan, kicking the door shut behind him. He pulled open the fridge, tossed an instant meal pack into the microwave, and then tossed himself face-first onto his couch. He got a nice, deep noseful of synthleather, idly observed that he had more ammunition in this house than food, and then groaned in exasperation when the microwave pinged behind him and he realized he’d have to stand up again.  
  
David sighed, his head throbbing. Despite his low magical potential, he did know one actual spell. His healing power knocked his concussion down to just a headache, but wouldn’t bring it any lower. So, now it was up to good ol’ Couch to finish his recovery.  
  
David closed his eyes, sinking into the synthleather, taking stock of his life.  
  
A month away from thirty. An apartment that was more of a closet. A career in CorpSec left behind for the freelance life. The majority of his net worth invested into his rifle, his pistol, and a duffel bag’s worth of ammunition, an investment he was still waiting to pay off. And, last and least, a thimble’s worth of magic in his veins, that was still enough for his family to consider him “lucky”.  
  
He was, somehow, still alive. He was also, unfortunately, unemployed.  
  
Not ideal, considering rent was due.  
  
David pulled himself up so he was sitting properly. His microwave beeped. He beeped back at it, mockingly. Then his commlink beeped, and he cringed at the noise, grudgingly reaching up and clicking it on.  
  
“Can I help you?” He muttered.  
  
A woman’s voice came on the line. Gruff, but playful.  
  
_“Yo, David! It’s me. How was your gig?”_  
  
“Hey Petra,” David sighed. “Let’s make this quick. I don’t know how much longer I can afford this comm frequency.”  
  
_“That bad, huh? Hey, you heard that shit on the news? Some hunters out in the woods got fucked up. Torn apart. They’re saying it’s some Awakened animal, like a super-bear or something.”_  
  
Sure, if by ‘bear’ you meant ‘girl with cyber-arms and super speed who almost killed me today’. David frowned. “That’s just the usual corp-sanctioned BS, Petra. You don’t believe that, do you?”  
  
_“Nah. It’s just what we got playing at the bar. Why aren’t you here, huh?”_  
  
David groaned. “...I have a headache.”  
  
_“Gettin’ a head start on that hangover?”_  
  
“Meh.”  
  
_“Well, you better get over here. Some dude out front, some bounty hunter or somethin’, is hiring people for some gig. 2000 nuyen a head, as long as you bring your own gun. You could use another job, right?”_ _  
_  
“And if I don’t?”  
  
_“Then you get to come to the bar and see me, asshole,”_ Petra laughed. _“C’mon. At least see what your man has to say.”_ _  
_  
“Alright, alright. I’ll check it out. See you in a bit.”  
  
_“Peace.”_  
  
David clicked off his commlink, letting out a weary sigh. His microwave beeped at him again. He mockingly beeped back. Eventually, he stood up and stretched, the throbbing in his skull having eased to a dull ache.  
  
2000 nuyen was a tidy sum. But a bounty hunter hiring an armed mob to help him go after a mark? There had to be a catch. There was always a catch.  
  
David’s microwave beeped again, and he glowered at it. Eventually, he heaved a sigh and slung his rifle back over his shoulder.  
  
A job was a job…  
  
~*~  
  
In the shadows of astral space, life shines with an inner light. Plants glimmer like fireflies. People without magical potential sleepwalk through the haze, all-but invisible in the sea of faces. But Mages burn brighter than most, their lives a beacon in a shadowed world.  
  
There are other things in the fog. Spirits. Phantoms. Daemons.  
  
If you can see them, they can see you.  
  
Glory was a Mage once. Power ran through her veins, a bright lure in the darkness that led the daemon to her heart. And then the daemon entered her, empowered her, made her burn out of control-  
  
-and her mother fell victim to the flame.  
  
In her guilt, and in her grief,  she cut off her magic. Tore her Essence away by installing outdated cyberware, the surgery mutilating her, body and soul. Now her magic slumbers within her, a flame smothered by a damp cloth, smoking and sizzling but unable to truly catch fire.  
  
Glory lay on a cot in her makeshift safehouse. She’d chosen an empty office building, which was as good a place as any for her to rest her head. She didn’t need much in terms of accomodation. This place still had water, electricity, and a roof, which was already more than she normally asked for. Not that it mattered. She wouldn’t be here long.  
  
Glory exhaled, gazing up at the ceiling, imagining she could see the stars beyond the plaster and the smog. She clasped her arms on her stomach, drumming her chrome fingers against her skin. Idly, she reached beneath her and scratched at the machined metal plate at the small of her back.  
  
When she first started her hunt, she’d tried to blend in. She tried covering herself up in long coats and gloves. But it was hard to find sleeves that would fit around her arms’ mechanical bulk, and simply extending her hand razors would ruin any gloves she wore.  
  
She was hardly inconspicuous. Anybody could pick her out in a crowd.  
  
But she wasn’t hiding from people. She was hiding from the things lurking in astral space, and there, she was all-but invisible.  
  
Glory raised a hand to the light and examined it, all chrome and dark steel and red stains that wouldn’t scrub out. She’d paid a high price indeed to escape the daemon, The Horned King. Now, she was putting all her time, money, and effort into hunting him down- him, and the human cult leader whose skin he wore like a coat.  
  
_Harrow._  
  
Glory’s breath hitched in her throat. She shook the memory away.  
  
There was one thing the cyberdoc hadn’t told her, when she got the implants that would tear her Essence to pieces. Maybe he just didn’t know.  
  
It was a little thing, compared to the obvious, drastic changes. But, every night, ever since the surgery…  
  
Glory doesn’t dream.  
  
She remembers…  
  
~*~  
  
_The Talismonger’s shop. Smoke. Incense. Velvet curtains. Candles. Gods stare down at her from every wall. Buddha. Vishnu. Ra. Amaterasu. Odin. Then, incongruously, their carved idols disappear into cardboard boxes and shipping crates, as the Talismonger’s assistant packs them away._ _  
__  
__The woman, Absinthe, grimaces as she empties another shelf into a box. She handles them delicately, even reverently, but the act still seems vulgar. Obscene._ _  
__  
__Absinthe looks up at her. The blonde elf is beautiful, in a mysterious, beguiling way, though her smile is heavy with a profound sadness. She reminds Glory of another woman she knew, once, although_ her _hair was fire-red._ _  
__  
__The Talismonger stands, pensive, hands clasped behind his back. He turns, shimmering robe dusting the ground, regarding Glory with his glowing amber eyes and almost fatherly smile._ _  
__  
__She looked up to him, in a way. Aside from literally, as he_ was _an elf._ _  
__  
__“I thought Saeder-Krupp had kicked you out,” Glory says. “I was worried I wouldn’t catch you.”_ _  
__  
__“I have some influence with S-K,” Aljernon says casually, as if he isn’t talking about having ‘influence’ with one of the largest and most powerful mega-corporations in the world. “I was able to delay our eviction. And I’m glad you caught us, child. You have an order to pick up…”_ _  
_  
~*~  
  
They gathered in the street by the dozens, brandishing not torches and pitchforks, but pocket knives, beer bottles, sawn-off shotguns and cheap pistols. They were there, chasing the lure of easy money- but with his luck, David knew, no money was ever easy.  
  
David adjusted his rifle sling against his shoulder, gazing up at the squat, two-storey office building sitting in front of them. ‘For Rent’ signs peeked out of its darkened windows.  
  
David felt uncomfortably like a member of a lynch mob. All this, just for a single fugitive? What the hell did they _do_?  
  
He scanned the length of the street. He wasn’t too familiar with this part of the city, but he did know that they were a long way from the corporate holdings in the central district. Even with what looked like the beginning of a riot breaking out, nobody would come. Nobody would care. Beyond corporate property, this city had no law. They could burn down the whole sprawl as long as the blaze didn’t singe the topiary.  
  
The man next to him took a long draw on a cigarette, before dropping it on the street and crushing it under his boot. He blew the plume of blue smoke into David’s face.  
  
“What outfit are you with, skinny?” he asked.  
  
David waved the question away with the smoke. “Freelance,” he said.  
  
“Oh, yeah?” The other man grinned and rolled up his sleeve. On his forearm was a tattoo, a sledgehammer framed by a bolt of lightning.  
  
“Y’see this?” He asked, a cocksure grin on his face. “I’m with the Sixth Street Hammerheads. Most of these other guys? They’re my boys.”  
  
David casually scanned the crowd, noting the gang tattoos on exposed forearms. A good chunk of the crowd were street gangsters, sure, but he also noticed a handful of people with heavier gear- armored vests, shotgun shells in bandoliers, belts of grenades. Freelancers, most likely. Just like him.  
  
“We’re about to get the biggest payday we’ve had in months,” the man kept talking, to David’s quiet disappointment. “Check out this mob, man. There’s gotta be, like, fifty guys here. At 2000 nuyen a head? The boss must be loaded.”  
  
_Or_ , David thought grimly, _he doesn’t think we’ll survive._  
  
David glanced back at their boss, then, the man who’d hired them for the job. He wasn’t hard to spot, for a number of reasons. He was dressed in a fine, well-tailored suit that, on these streets, might well be a neon sign flashing ‘Rob Me’. He wore sunglasses at night, which was already conspicuous enough, but to top it off, had a pair of attack hoverdrones looming over his shoulders.  
  
For whatever reason, out of all this, the detail that most caught David’s eye was his tattoo. Because despite his nice suit, he didn’t wear a tie; the top of his shirt was unbuttoned, revealing a tattoo on his collarbone that glinted strangely in the light.  
  
Not a tattoo, David realized. A scar. A brand.  
  
A pair of antlers, cradling a flame.  
  
Across the way, the branded man stood impassively, the calm eye of a restless storm. His assembled mob fidgeted and shifted their weight on their feet, eagerly awaiting his command. He smiled, relishing the power of a single word, and the promise of payment. Mortal men are so easily swayed.  
  
His commlink chirped.  
  
_“Mr. Flint?”_  
  
“Go ahead.”  
  
_“Spotter 4 has visual. Target confirmed.”_  
  
“Very good.”  
  
Flint clicked off his commlink and gazed up at the crowd. He took a step forward. Then another. And another. In the span of three steps, every man in that crowd had turned towards him, as if pulled by invisible strings. They were watching him. Waiting for him. Waiting for his command.  
  
How easy it was, how satisfying, for men to die for him.  
  
“Gentlemen,” he said, in a voice trained to carry. “Begin the attack.”  
  
~*~  
  
_Aljernon opened a little black jewelry box, and there, cushioned in velvet, was the artifact she’d requested. Glory took it in her hands, carefully, delicately, afraid that the slightest touch from her steel fingers would shatter the piece, and her ambitions with it._ _  
__  
__“The Rose Compass,” Aljernon said. Glory studied the intricately engraved casing, the whorls of metal forming what could have been a rose, or what could have been a flame._ _  
__  
__Glory unclasped the casing and clicked it open. Inside, there were two needles- one red and black, pointing North-South, and a second, red engraved with a gold flame._ _  
__  
__“It functions perfectly well as a normal compass, of course,” Aljernon continued. “The red-and-black needle is attuned to magnets. Dreadfully ordinary. The other... “ He chuckled. “Well. The other is attuned to an astral signature. That of the Horned King, and those who serve him.”_ _  
__  
__Glory turned, aligning the mundane compass needle with north and south. The flame swiveled on its mount, before settling on a direction._ _  
__  
__West._ _  
__  
__“How much?” Glory asked, her voice tight. Aljernon met her eyes, somber._ _  
__  
__“I cannot take your money, child,” Aljernon said gently. “Take it. Let the flame guide your way. This hunt of yours will cost you more than enough…”_ _  
_  
~*~  
  
A bang downstairs snapped Glory awake.  
  
She sat up in her cot, the perfectly-preserved memory of the Talismonger’s shop vanishing from her senses. The scent of incense parted like a cloud, making way for dust, plaster, and- less perceptibly- the scent of violence.  
  
Another bang shook the air. Glory crouched low, rising only for a moment to peek out the window.  
  
The glass shattered. Glory threw herself down as gunfire raked across the wall, the ceiling, the broken remnants of her window. She rolled across the floor to her cot, yanking her PDA and its charger out of the wall and tucking it away.  
  
Glory patted herself down, checking for her meager possessions- her PDA, her credstick, the Compass, her revolver- when she heard the crash of the front door giving way, and footsteps swarming the first floor.  
  
Glory sat on the floor, her back against her cot, facing the top of the stairwell. She’d only caught a glimpse of it, but it seemed like there was a whole damn mob after her. She was penned in, a hail of gunfire waiting in the street and a beating coming up the steps.  
  
Glory drew her revolver, a Ruger-brand Super Warhawk. On its grip, right above her thumb, there was an engraving- a poplar tree. It had been a gift, what felt like a lifetime ago.  
  
Her friends. Her team…  
  
Damn it. Try as she might, she couldn’t bite back the selfish thought flitting through her head. She wished she had her team.  
  
She’d picked this safehouse because it was inconspicuous, not because it was a fortress. But if she’d had her team, they would have made it work. If she’d had Dietrich, the shaman, shrouding them all in the Dragonslayer’s protective aura. If she’d had Blitz and his drone, Max, marking targets, working fire support, cracking wise to lift the mood. If she’d had Eiger on sniper duty at the window, or covering the stairs with her shotgun… Shit, in a mess like this, she wished she had _two_ Eigers with her. And Poplar…  
  
_You made your choice_.  
  
Glory pressed her lips into a line.  
  
She didn’t have her team. What she _had_ was a job to do.  
  
Which meant she couldn’t die here.  
  
Glory burst to her feet just as a man came up the stairwell, flecked in splinters of wood from when he’d crashed through her front door.  
  
Glory shot him in the face and kicked him down the steps, a dozen gangsters lined up behind.  
  
~*~  
  
The crowd was split. Half of them had guns trained on the office’s windows, watching for movement. The other half was charging inside and, from the sounds of the chaotic melee within, into a bloodbath.  
  
David wasn’t keen to go charging to his death. He was climbing the fire escape of a nearby building, searching for a sniper perch with a better view of the office.  
  
He shouldered his rifle, resting it on the rail. He panned his scope across the crowd.  
  
There was the client, Mr. Flint, with his two hoverdrones, standing behind the mob with his arms crossed, waiting for results. There was one hell of a fight going on inside that office, from the sound of it, but Mr. Flint didn’t seem all that bothered.  
  
Strangely, neither did the rest of the mob. Sure, they yelled and cursed and beat their chests like frat boys, but there was something… off, about them.  
  
David exhaled, slipping his vision into astral space. Mr. Flint’s aura burned hot and red, like a road flare. Threads of fiery red light trailed between him and the mob assaulting the office, as well as connecting him and the twin shadows of the drones above his shoulders. That was… strange. It was almost like-  
  
_Focus, David. That would be ridiculous._  
  
David swept his aim, following the shining traceries of astral space even through the office’s physical walls. Inside, he saw a bonfire of red and orange light, a rich and brutal tapestry of threads being cut. He followed the storm of light to the curious darkness at its center.  
  
It was the eye of a hurricane. A shadow, with a green flame at its heart.  
  
David’s eyes went wide.  
  
_No..._  
  
~*~  
  
Glory fired her last round into a gangster’s skull. The flood of bodies behind him slapped his corpse away, like a parked car in the path of a flood. They surged up the stairs, barely slowing from his dead weight, forcing Glory back up the landing.  
  
Glory swore, holstered her revolver and extended her hand razors. Silver and crimson flashed in her hands. She slashed open stomachs, wrists, throats. She shattered a man’s jaw with a punch, smashed her heavy, cybernetic elbow into a man’s face, left him sputtering and spitting blood.  
  
A knife came down. It jammed into her cybernetic bicep with a flash of sparks. She flexed her arm and snapped the blade, breaking a man’s neck with a backhanded slap.  
  
An aluminum baseball bat smashed into her hip. Glory cried out, falling to one knee. She caught a wrist on the next swing, yanking the man forward onto his stomach. His neck snapped under Glory’s boot heel.  
  
A beer bottle smashed down into Glory’s forearm, the sharpened edge thrusting towards her stomach. Glory caught the stabbing arm with both hands, stopping the blow before she was impaled, and twisted, throwing the man into the room behind her. As soon as his silhouette passed in front of the open window, the shooters on the street below lit him up.  
  
Two spotlights came on behind Glory. She cracked a man’s skull against the staircase’s heavy wooden banister with a spinning kick, whirling around to meet them.  
  
Two hoverdrones loomed outside, their weapon mounts whirring as they locked on.  
  
A man charged at Glory from behind and she sidestepped him, darting behind his muscled bulk as two ragged holes tore him through. She ran, high-caliber shots shredding the room around her.  
  
Glory’s hand wandered to the grip of her revolver, knowing it was empty, cringing at the thought that her old Savalette Guardian, modded for high ammo capacity, wouldn’t have had this problem- but then, her revolver had been a gift.  
  
Instead, Glory splayed her hand razors, leapt up onto a wall, and pounced.  
  
She dove out the open window, raking her claws down the length of a drone chassis, kicking up sparks and shredded metal. She tucked and rolled as she hit the ground, the stricken drone falling and crashing down-  
  
And then a shotgun blast slammed into her back and threw her face-down onto the street.  
  
Glory gasped with pain, spitting blood onto the pavement. The buckshot left a bloody constellation etched into her back. Fatigue clawed at her, fraying her focus. An otherworldly green fire manifested in her skin, the soft green glow tracing her veins.  
  
_Get up, Glory. Get up. Get up!_  
  
Glory stood, shotgun pellets dribbling out of her skin and hitting the ground.  
  
The mob surged around her. She crushed a man’s wrist in her augmetic grip, caught his pistol and emptied it at the remaining drone, but it wove around her shots, exhaustion spoiling her aim.  
  
A machete chopped into her shoulder, burying itself in the seam between her organic shoulder and cybernetic arm. Glory hissed in pain and frustration, cracking the man’s ribs with a punch.  
  
She crouched and shielded herself with her cyber-arms, a second shotgun blast exploding off her augmetics in a cloud of sparks and chipped metal. She cried out and slashed the man’s torso open, shoulder to hip, slicing through the belt of grenades across his chest. She lobbed them into the crowd and they exploded into a cloud of electrified smoke.  
  
A gunshot rang through the air. It blasted a ragged hole in her thigh and she fell to her knees, gasping in pain and fatigue. Glory looked up at the remaining drone, hovering disdainfully above the fray. She sighed, her breath coming in ragged gasps.  
  
The men nearest to her were dead. The men beyond them shivered and convulsed in the cloud of electrified smoke, stunned. The men beyond them were blinded by the smoke. But as soon as the smoke cleared, they’d be right back on her.  
  
_How long can you keep this up?_  
  
“As long as it takes,” Glory said softly, like a prayer.  
  
A man in a nice suit sauntered up to Glory, his hands folded across his chest. His surviving drone lowered so it was hovering behind Glory, just out of reach.  
  
Glory grit her teeth as she saw the brand on the man’s chest, peeking out from beneath his shirt. A pair of antlers, cradling a flame.  
  
“My name is Mr. Flint,” her executioner said as he approached. “And you, my dear, have been bad for business.”  
  
Flint raised his hand-  
  
-and a high-powered round struck his drone so hard that it spun through the air.  
  
Flint cringed as sympathetic pain flared across his senses. He clutched his head in pain, searching for the shooter.  
  
A second shot struck Flint’s drone in its fuel cell and it went off like a grenade. The explosion shook the air and the echo of it surged through Flint’s body, dropping the branded man in a crumpled heap on the ground.  
  
Glory watched as a rail-thin man- an elf- jumped down from a nearby fire escape and ran over to her. He crouched, scooping up a pair of fallen grenades and lobbing them at her safehouse. They exploded into a fresh smoke cloud, cutting them off from the rest of the mob.  
  
He raised a hand, soft blue light shimmering at his fingertips. Ocean-blue met forest-green as healing magic worked to mend the awful wound in her thigh.  
  
The pain ebbed, but the exhaustion lingered. It took a long moment for her to get to her feet.

The elf looked at her, urgently, his anxiety showing in his eyes.  
  
“Come on!” He pleaded.  
  
A shot rang out, and the boy jerked forward. Glory caught him in her arms, saw the tear in his long coat, the wound in his back, and the branded man, who’d produced a holdout pistol from his jacket.  
  
“Never turn your back on the Firepact!” He growled, and though he was still reeling from dump shock, his aim was steady.  
  
Glory’s gaze flitted from the boy, shot in the back, to the man who shot him, to the shadows of gangsters looming in the smoke.  
  
Glory’s adrenal pump hummed as it poured one last surge of energy into her weary limbs. She hugged the boy to her chest. Two pistol rounds spanked off the metal of her shoulder, her implants running hot, as she bundled him under her arm and fled into the night.  
  
~*~  
  
_Glory stayed with her even as the others filed away, Eiger looking stiff in her old dress uniform, Blitz quiet and somber in the only suit he owned. Poplar stared down at the mound of earth, blinking away tears, but Glory’s grief settled in her heart like a stone._ _  
_ _  
_ _“It always ends like this,” Poplar whispered, letting a rose fall from her fingers and into the grave._ _  
_  
~*~  
  
Glory blinked the memory away. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep. Not really. But then, she hadn’t meant for a lot of things.  
  
It was a moonless night. Glory coiled her arms above her head and stretched, popping her joints. Healing magic could physically seal a wound. Her own magic, a gift from the Heart of Feurstelle, could even repair damaged cybernetics- somehow. Bones reset, blood congealed, flesh reknit. But the pain always lingered.  
  
Grief was a wound no magic could heal.  
  
It did wonders for David’s gunshot wound, though. A soft green glow lingered above his chest, before fading, carried off on a breeze that smelled of honeysuckle and spring.  
  
David rose, blinking, his eyes adjusting to the pre-dawn light. At first, he mistook the charcoal-grays of the world around him for astral space- but as it was, he could see Glory only in shadow, without the green flame binding the scraps of her Essence together.  
  
David sat up, bringing his fingers to the ragged hole in his shirt- and the unbroken flesh beneath.  
  
“Thank you,” he said.  
  
Glory sat cross-legged on the grass, gazing out at the treeline. She looked almost meditative, not that David could make out much in the low light.  
  
“Why did you save me?” Glory asked.  
  
It wasn’t a demand, and it wasn’t a threat. The first thing that came to David’s mind was that his first encounter with her was terrifying, and that he would’ve rather taken his chances with a crowd of gangsters than tried to fight her again.  
  
He didn’t say that. Instead, he shrugged.  
  
“Karma,” he said. “Why did you?”  
  
Glory nodded sagely.  
  
“I was thinking,” Glory began, “that I might need a bodyguard.”  
  
The sight of Glory in combat flashed across David’s eyes. He snorted. “I don’t think you do,” he said.  
  
“Is that any way to talk to someone offering you a job?”  
  
David blinked. “...Oh.”  
  
“It seems only fair, as I seem to be the reason you’re now unemployed,” Glory shrugged. “There will be conditions, of course. I’m pursuing a cult leader across Europe. We won’t be staying in one place too long. There will be a lot of traveling. A lot of fighting. Even killing. Is that okay with you?”  
  
David swallowed. Nodded. “I don’t mind going on the road. And I didn’t get this gun to hunt rabbits.”  
  
“Good,” Glory nodded. “Because the people I’m after are much worse than that.”  
  
A red sun began to rise, staining the sky like blood in water. Glory drew the Rose Compass from her pocket, opened it, then turned toward David, her back to the sun.  
  
“What’s your name?” Glory asked, studying the device in her palm.  
  
“David,” he replied.  
  
Glory sniffed. Almost smiled. “‘And Goliath.’ That’s fitting.”  
  
She looked up from the Rose Compass, her eyes tinged with crimson.  
  
“I’m Glory.”  
  
David got to his feet, slinging his rifle over his injured shoulder. In the cool spring breeze, he couldn’t feel the pain at all.  
  
“I’m at your service, Glory,” David bowed his head. “Where do we go from here?”  
  
David blinked, and in that moment, slipping into astral space, he saw the threads of crimson light unspooling from the compass in Glory’s hands. He saw the trail of embers stretch out to the horizon, the path of fire leading Glory away from the rising sun and out into the dark.  
  
Glory turned to him, and he saw her heart- a silvery mass of tattered, ragged essence, held together by a green fire that suffused her soul like the roots of a great tree.  
  
And just like that, David was back in realspace, gazing into the eyes of a girl filled with grim purpose, haloed by the rising sun.  
  
“West,” Glory said, and she began to walk, David following in her shadow.  
  
~*~  
  
_“I can go with you,” Poplar said, fighting tears. “Just say the word.”_ _  
_ _  
_ _Glory didn’t say the word. She didn’t say anything. But the silence yet boomed between them, like a bomb had just gone off and left their ears ringing._ _  
_ _  
_ _“Go, then.” Poplar said, forcing a smile. “‘Follow the trail of embers to the one crowned in fire. Find him. Bring him to justice. No matter what it takes.’ That’s what Aljernon told you, right?”_ _  
_ _  
_ _Glory nodded, instinctively curling a hand around the Rose Compass._ _  
_ _  
_ _“But when you’re done,” Poplar said, her voice low and pleading. “When you’ve caught Harrow, and you’ve finally gutted the bastard…"  
  
Poplar looked into Glory's eyes, and the fire stirred in her heart.  
  
"Come home, Glory. I’ll wait for you. We’ll wait for you. For as long as it takes.” _ _  
_  
~*~


	2. Chasing Shadows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> David has a few loose ends to tie up in Halcyon City before he can join Glory's hunt in earnest. And, though she doesn't realize it yet, Glory does, too.

_~*~_ _  
__  
_ It was a beautiful morning in Halcyon City, not that anyone at street level was able to tell. The sun peeked through the smog and illuminated penthouses and corporate boardrooms, casting the rest of the city in their shadow, leaving the 99 percent to scratch a living in the dark.  
  
Only here, in her modest room within the Church of the Nameless Queen, did that darkness become something more. Something sacred.  
  
In the sliver of daylight that fell across her room, Sister Magdalene bowed her head and prayed.  
  
Magdalene lifted her head, amber eyes meeting the carved idol on her wall- the symbol of Venus, so like an ankh, icon of the Nameless Queen. She took a deep breath and sighed, reflexively reaching up to curl her hair behind her shoulders, only managing to ruffle the fabric of her veil.  
  
There was a knock.  
  
“Come in,” Magdalene called, rising to her feet.  
  
Sister Ashe slipped inside, looking radiant in pure white edged with red.  
  
“Eldest,” Magdalene bowed.  
  
“Sister,” Ashe smiled, taking in the room. “Today’s the day, mm?”  
  
“Yes, ma’am,” Magdalene said, resting her hand on her luggage.  
  
“What that man did to you was awful, just awful,” Ashe cooed. “It has been a great privilege to watch you heal.”  
  
“It has been my privilege to have you watching over me,” Magdalene replied. “A year of charity and piety has changed me for the better. But I think it’s time I went out in the world for a bit. See where the Queen takes me.”  
  
“Who have you chosen as your matron?”  
  
“Hecate,” Magdalene said. “Goddess of magic, and the crossroads.”  
  
“A fine choice,” Ashe smiled. “Shall we pray together, Sister Magdalene, one last time?”  
  
Magdalene knelt at her bedside, and Ashe crossed the room to join her. Together, they bowed before the icon of the Nameless Queen.  
  
“We are one with the goddesses,” they began, shadows coiling around them, “and the goddesses are one with our Queen…”  
  
~*~  
  
David Wen was not a Church-going man.  
  
He supposed that growing up with astral perception would do that to a person. Gazing through astral space held all the mystique of looking into people’s souls. Maybe if he could see God in astral space, then he’d believe in them.  
  
David sat in the lobby of the Church of the Nameless Queen. It was quiet, reverent, although the sounds of clinking spoons and warm conversation bled over from the kitchen next door.  
  
A carved idol of the Queen herself loomed before him on a stone pedestal. It was a statue of a woman, sitting with her legs crossed and her hands in her lap. Her face was featureless, and shrouded in a cloth veil.  
  
As David understood it, the Nameless Queen wasn’t _a_ goddess, but _every_ goddess. All the aspects of womanhood, raised to the divine. Every Sister who served the Church chose a matron, a goddess whose aspect they devoted their lives to. A Sister could have a matron in, say, Danu, Irish mother goddess and progenitor of the Tuatha De, to live a life of motherhood and caring for children. They could choose Isis, and heal the sick. Demeter, and feed the hungry. Or they could pick Bast, because hey, cats are cool.  
  
David snickered, and immediately felt guilty. He cleared his throat, gazing up at the Queen.  
  
Out of curiosity, David’s vision slid into astral space. The church was not the charcoal-gray of the mundane world, but seemed to glow slightly, infused with power. Threads of colored light hung in the air around him, thrumming with the weight of memory.  
  
In David’s mind’s eye, he saw the echoes of hundreds of women, who came to this door and knelt at the feet of the Queen. Women who came here, seeking benediction, sanctuary, or even just a warm meal and a place to sleep. Women who had to hide their bruises, women with unquiet minds and shaking hands. Women seeking a fresh start.  
  
Their phantoms gathered here, at the foot of the Nameless Queen, their lives shimmering like fireflies. And in the center of it all, the idol of the Nameless Queen lay silent, inscrutable, an altar of shadow haloed with light.  
  
Meanwhile, the kitchen next door was ablaze with activity, and in astral space that crowd burned like a bonfire, a stark contrast to the stillness here in the church proper.  
  
God, it seemed, was in the work, not just the faith.  
  
“Mr. Wen?”  
  
David snapped up, the radiant color of astral space dimming to the ambient dark of the church in reality.  
  
“Yes? Sorry.”  
  
A Sister, robed and veiled in midnight blue, smiled from the door.  
  
“The Eldest will see you now.”  
  
~*~  
  
Glory was next door, studying her PDA while an untouched cup of soykaf cooled on the table beside her. At a window a dozen tables away, robed Sisters were serving the kitchen’s morning crowd. Glory scanned the sea of fuzzy hats and poofy winter coats, suddenly feeling rather exposed in her vest and uncased chrome.  
  
Some people covered their cybernetic limbs with a layer of synthskin, but Glory’s arms were too bulky for it to look natural. Even so, it wasn’t people looking at her cyber-arms, or her chest, that got Glory feeling vulnerable.  
  
It was the fact that she was in a soup kitchen. A soup kitchen, and a church.  
  
How long had it been since she’d visited either?  
  
Glory sighed, tapping at her PDA with a steel fingertip, watching data scroll down the screen. A plan began taking shape in her head.  
  
It all seemed faintly blasphemous, really. Here she was, a career criminal and hardened killer, casually plotting a string of murders while sitting in a church. The very thought would drive her religious nutjob of a father up the wall, which almost made Glory smile. Almost.  
  
Glory reached into her vest pocket and withdrew the Rose Compass, gleaming in the kitchen’s dim yellow light. She clicked it open, turning in her seat to align the first pin with north and south.  
  
Glory narrowed her eyes.  
  
The red-and-gold pin, which had until now steadily pointed west, shivered and spun in place.  
  
There was a flicker of motion in her peripheral vision. Glory snapped the Compass closed and pocketed it in an eyeblink. A shadow loomed above her.  
  
“Bowl for you, dear?” A Sister asked, robed in blue.  
  
Glory blinked. “What?”  
  
“Well, you were sitting all the way out here, all on your lonesome,” the older woman continued. “I thought I should ask.”  
  
“Oh,” Glory said, caught off-guard. God, how long had it been since she’d even had another person to talk to that wasn’t trying to kill her? Weeks? Months? The stag-headed spirit, the _other_ voice in her head, wasn’t really one for lengthy conversation.  
  
“There’s no shame in it, you know,” the Sister was saying. “Everyone is welcome here.”  
  
She had a heart-shaped face, and laugh lines creasing her eyes. The first thing Glory thought of was her mother- a flash, a vision of fire, and she flinched the memory away.  
  
“Sorry,” Glory said, embarrassed to be caught so unprepared for something as simple as social interaction. “I, um. I’m not-”  
  
“She’s with me, Sister Shelley.”  
  
Glory exhaled as David appeared, picking his way through the crowd to join them. Sister Shelly glanced at him before turning her gaze back to Glory, nodding as if in approval.  
  
“Is she, now, David?” Shelley asked. “She is a beauty.”  
  
“Thank you, ma’am,” Glory said.  
  
“She’s my _boss_ ,” David interjected.  
  
“Professional boundaries! How thrilling!” Shelley chortled. David sighed and rolled his eyes.  
  
~*~  
  
A pair of introductions and a hurried- one might say _eager_ \- escape later, and Glory and David were in David’s car, leaving the Church of the Nameless Queen in their wake.  
  
Glory was in the back seat. David’s little sedan was cramped, and the bulk of Glory’s cyber-arms meant she couldn’t ride up front. Still, she felt uncomfortable letting David drive her around. She hired him to be her bodyguard, not her chauffeur. It was bad enough she was paying him to shoot people. He didn’t have to drive her around.  
  
Glory folded her hands in her lap, watching her reflection in the window.  
  
How much difference a day makes. Glory had known David for scarcely 48 hours, and now, she had a car, a trunk full of supplies- and a friend. All firsts, as far as Glory’s hunt was concerned. And, feeling adventurous, Glory decided to go for another:  
  
“That place seemed nice enough.”  
  
For the first time in what felt like ages, Glory started a conversation.  
  
“It’s alright,” David said lightly.  
  
“Are you always so generous with your paycheck, Mr. Wen?” Glory asked.  
  
“It’s karma,” David shrugged. “Always give the first one away. That’s what my parents used to say, at any rate. It’s easy, when you’ve been on both sides of the line.”  
  
Glory nodded.  
  
“What else do they do? The Sisters,” Glory said.  
  
“Besides the kitchen? They run a homeless shelter- I’ve been on that line, too, once upon a time. They run a library. They’ve got an orphanage, too, but thankfully I never needed that one. My folks are just fine. As for whatever else? I dunno. Pray?”  
  
Glory smiled. It was a little thing, but it was there.  
  
“They sound a little too good to be true.”  
  
“You’re not the only one who thinks so,” David muttered. “Some people don’t like the whole ‘Nameless Queen’ thing. Think it’s creepy. Me, I think some people won’t like religion no matter what you do. They’d rather place their trust in a nice, secular street gang. Pfft. The Sisters have done more for this city than the gangs ever have. The Hammerheads are only good for hitting things, and we don’t talk about the Great Whites.”  
  
“Are all the gangs in this city named after sharks?”  
  
“That’s not where they get the name,” David said with a grimace.  
  
Understanding flitted across Glory’s impassive face, followed closely by disgust.  
  
“...Ugh.”  
  
“You said it.”  
  
“I knew a man who ran a charity, once,” Glory said, eager to change the subject. “Samuel Beckenbauer. Nice guy.”  
  
“What happened to him?”  
  
Phantoms danced across Glory’s eyes. Berlin. The Kreuzbasar. CorpSec in full military gear. Boots on concrete. Smoke. Ashes. Embers.  
  
Glory worked her jaw.  
  
“I… don’t know,” she admitted.  
  
Silence hung heavy between them. David stole glances of her in the rearview mirror, his lips curling into a frown.  
  
“Sorry,” he said.  
  
“It’s not your fault,” Glory said, her voice cold.  
  
“No, I mean… I’m sorry.”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
Uneasy quiet crept back between them. Eventually, Glory heaved a sigh and pulled out her PDA, breaking the silence with the drumming of her chrome fingers against the casing.  
  
“I have our next target,” she announced. “The Compass won’t show us the way because we’re right on top of it. According to the data I took from the cell in the woods, there is another cell here in the city. They call themselves the ‘Communion’. Their leader, ‘Father Servo’, holds worship at a defunct warehouse, out on the docks. And they’ve got a meeting tonight.”  
  
David glanced back at her.  
  
“Do you think this ‘Father Servo’ has any connection to that suit who tried to kill you the other night? Flint, I think?”  
  
“We’ll just have to ask him,” Glory said. “Worship starts at 8 PM. We’re going to need some supplies. And some hardware. Tech.”  
  
David nodded.  
  
“I know just the place.”  
  
~*~  
  
David spent the afternoon coming to terms with his new career. There was a fine line between “freelancer” and “shadowrunner”, a line that primarily consisted of how dirty you were willing to get your hands. But David wasn’t stupid. Glory was hunting someone, and someone was hunting her. Violence was inevitable, and when it came down to it, he couldn’t hesitate.  
  
He should’ve been tense. He should’ve been nervous. But as he led Glory through Halcyon City’s commercial district, stocking up for the road, he didn’t _feel_ like a career criminal.  
  
Really, it just felt like shopping.  
  
“Here you go,” said Petra Blair, a brown-skinned ork with a jocular grin, slapping a box down onto the counter. “Your new commlinks. Short-range, private frequency. Set of four, because I’m feeling generous. They’re only really good for calling each other, but it’ll do you better than that store-brand hunk of junk you’re wearing now.”  
  
“Thanks, Petra,” David said, reaching up to his comm. It came alive at his touch, releasing a chime:  
  
_“This comm frequency is no longer in service. If you’d like to open an account-”_  
  
David pulled the comm out of his ear and disdainfully flicked it into the garbage. Petra snatched it out of the air.  
  
“Hey hey hey, those are perfectly good parts!”  
  
Glory lurked a few steps behind, taking in the store. The Papillon Heart did repairs and tech on the side, but it was a simsense parlor at heart. The front desk was faced by rows and rows of reclining chairs, like an old-style movie theater, only each chair had keypads in its arms and a visor built into its headrest.  
  
Glory watched as a businessman in a cheap suit and a frazzled expression walked in and went right past the front desk, sinking into a chair without a word. He pulled the visor down over his eyes, slotted his credstick into the armrest, and pressed a key. He shivered for a moment, before going slack, all the tension leaving his body in an instant- lost in his own little world.  
  
Glory’s lips twitched downwards in a frown.  
  
“Now these,” Petra was saying, dropping another two boxes onto the counter with a rattle. “These, we had to make special.”  
  
David slid the box open and picked out a rifle round with a translucent tip. A second, smaller box held smaller, molded gel rounds, sized for a pistol.  
  
“These ain’t for paintball, buddy,” Petra grinned. “Phasic rounds. Hyperconductive gel around a chemical core. Fire the shot, round goes splat, guy gets filled with electricity and goes down without a big red mess. It’s rated against humans, so orks and trolls might need more than one shot. And, uh, careful using it against dwarves.”  
  
“Will do,” David said, tucking the boxes away. “Thank you.”  
  
Petra sank down in her chair, resting her chin in her hands. She fixed David with a conspiratorial grin. David blinked.  
  
“What?”  
  
“So,” Petra teased, “who’s your date?”  
  
“Don’t you start,” David muttered. “She’s my boss.”  
  
“Oh, yeah? What’s her name?”  
  
“Glory.”  
  
“Gloria?”  
  
“Nah, just Glory.”  
  
“That’s cool,” Petra shrugged. “Hey, boss lady!”  
  
Glory turned, pointing at herself with a chrome finger and a quizzical expression.  
  
“You want to jump in?” Petra offered, tipping her head towards the chairs. “First one’s on the house.”  
  
Glory gazed across the bank of simsense terminals, reflexively crossing her arms across her chest.  
  
“...No, thank you,” Glory said, awkward. “I’m not really a fan.”  
  
“You sure?” David asked, sporting a sardonic, teasing grin. “The Papillon Heart _is_ the city’s ‘premiere location for full-immersion entertainment’.”  
  
“Honestly, I prefer trid,” Glory shrugged. “I never really got into chips. Too many horror stories of people losing themselves in there. At least with trid, I know what’s real.”  
  
“It’s not about what’s real,” David said. “It’s about what people need.”  
  
“Well, whatever you two _need_ private comms and stun rounds for, good luck with that,” Petra chimed in. “Hopefully you two won’t need it.”  
  
~*~  
  
_A woman robed in midnight blue wandered down the street, rolling her luggage behind her. She shifted the weight of the bag on her shoulder, taking in the smell of the sea. The sun was setting, painting the sky in pink and gold, and casting long shadows down the docks._ _  
__  
__Shadows that lengthened, and became men._ _  
__  
__She pulled herself aside as men strode past her, trailing in from side streets in twos and threes. A voice sounded behind her and she froze, tension filling her spine._ _  
__  
__“Excuse me, miss,” asked a dwarf._ _  
__  
__He wore a cassock, which, combined with his small stature, made him seem friendly enough. Ruining the image, however, were the armed gangsters that followed at his heels, looming over his shoulders._ _  
__  
__The dwarf smiled, all teeth and no warmth._ _  
__  
__“Are you here for the Communion?”_ _  
_  
~*~  
  
“This should be far enough,” Glory said, as they pulled into the far corner of a defunct restaurant’s parking lot. “We’ll go the rest of the way on foot.”  
  
“Got it,” David said. He got out and popped the trunk. Rummaging through their supplies, he filled his belt pouches with spare magazines, He slipped a clip of Petra’s special rounds into his pistol and racked the slide, a soft blue glow appearing at the base of the grip. He holstered it, reaching into the trunk and pulling out his trusty rifle. He slung it over his shoulder.  
  
“Now, just to be clear,” David began, “we’re only here to ask some questions, right?”  
  
“An old friend used to say, ‘only switch to bullets once you’ve run out of words’,” Glory said, her expression unreadable.  
  
“But you’re not a big talker, huh, boss?”  
  
“I’m not,” Glory said. “I’m not much of a sniper, either. Otherwise, you could’ve gone in and done all the talking.”  
  
David didn’t know if she was actually joking around with him or just flatly stating a fact. With Glory, it was hard to tell.  
  
“Gotta say, boss,” David said. “All this planning, all this prep, for a run like this. It’s a lot of work. You used to do all this by yourself?”  
  
“It was easier,” Glory said softly, “before.”  
  
She didn’t say “back in Berlin”, “when I had my team”, or “when we had Paul”. After all, she only had so many words to spare.  
  
David, for his part, knew by now not to pry. Everything Glory did, with the sole exception of combat, was so subdued. Her feelings didn’t show in her words, which were few, or her voice, which was flat. You had to go looking for them, in her face, her lips, her brow, her eyes. And it was rude to stare.  
  
Glory was not a woman who wore her emotions on her sleeves. Not that she wore sleeves to begin with.  
  
“Oh!” David said, reaching back into the trunk. “I almost forgot.”  
  
David produced a shopping bag from the corner of the trunk, offering it to Glory.  
  
“We’re going to the docks, yeah? We’re gonna be right by the water. I figured you might get cold.”  
  
Glory pulled a bundle out of the bag and unfurled it by the dim light of a streetlamp. It was a coat- a long, hooded coat in a rich chestnut brown, with a silk inner lining and the tell-tale feeling of synthweave, fabric designed to resist knives and pistol rounds as much as it could resist rain.  
  
“Thank you,” Glory blinked. “But I don’t know if it’ll-”  
  
“Just try it,” David urged.  
  
Glory slipped her arms through the sleeves, blinking in surprise as her bulky cybernetics didn’t catch on the fabric. She glanced at David, who held up his hands sheepishly.  
  
“I’m not much of a mage,” he explained. “Not in combat, at least. But I know a few tricks.”  
  
Glory pulled her coat around her, fastening the buttons, the belt. The fabric was slitted up the sides and along the back, keeping her legs free for running, and even giving her easy access to the thigh holster holding her revolver. The coat came to her knees in front but flared out in the back, giving the impression of tail feathers, lending her the profile of a bird of prey. And her sleeves fit snugly around her cyber-arms, accentuating her physique.  
  
She was, quite literally, silk hiding steel.  
  
Glory flexed, her coat pulling taut around her augmetic musculature but not breaking. The sleeves shimmered faintly in the light, the tell-tale signs of magicked cloth.  
  
“That’s a nice trick,” Glory said, with a smile in her eyes that almost managed to reach her lips. “Thank you.”  
  
“Any time,” David grinned. “Although, you know, being able to burst out of your clothes just by flexing isn’t a bad trick, either. Ever try using those muscles to catch somebody’s eye?”  
  
“There was one person,” Glory admitted, before she could catch herself.  
  
“Who was he?” David asked. “Or her. I shouldn’t assume.”  
  
A memory flashed across Glory’s eyes. Her, standing in the mirror at Paul Amsel’s antique shop/safehouse. She wasn’t trying to show off. Not really. She was just trying to reach a damaged servo with her tiny little maintenance screwdriver. But then there was Poplar in the mirror, gazing appreciatively at Glory’s arms, her back, and the flash of red on her face when Glory caught her staring…  
  
“Glory?” David asked.  
  
“No more talking,” Glory said abruptly, a flush creeping along her cheeks. She turned and began marching towards the docks, ignoring the puzzled expression on David’s face.  
  
“Come along, Mr. Wen,” she called out behind her. “We have work to do.”  
  
~*~  
  
_“Brothers and sisters, I ask of you: how do you define God?_ _  
__  
__“All-powerful. All-knowing. Inescapable._ _  
__  
__“In the days before the Crash, there was such a being: the collective repository of all the world’s knowledge, and bearer of the vast potential it held. Invisible, yet inescapable._ _  
__  
__“The hands of man have crafted much in the pursuit of God, and our longing to be closer to Him: towers to the heavens, machines in our likeness. And in the era before the Crash, the Babel of the digital age, we created something great. Something divine._ _  
__  
__“Humanity created the Cloud.”_ _  
_  
~*~  
  
A hired gun paced the rooftop, his shotgun propped on his shoulder. He idly scratched the hammer tattoo on his forearm, making no effort to stifle a lengthy yawn.  
  
A phasic round hit him in the chest and he toppled over in a flare of blue lightning.  
  
David vaulted up over the lip of the roof, dropping two more Hammerheads unconscious. He darted behind a wheezing ventilation unit, cringing as buckshot slammed into the casing. He curled around a corner and fired two shots, leaving the stunned Hammerhead staggering. David ran up as the electrical surge ran its course, grabbing him by the collar before he could fall two storeys. David instead dropped him two feet onto the dusty roof.  
  
David holstered his pistol and unslung his rifle, bracing it on the edge of the roof. Below him stretched the converted warehouse, its interior shining with electronic blue light.  
  
“This is David,” he said, peering through his scope. “I’m in position.”  
  
~*~  
  
_“But then the Crash came, and destroyed the Cloud, and we, like God, had our knowledge broken and scattered to the winds. We have been made in the image of one who was once whole, and now lies divided. But through our Communion, we can be made whole again._ _  
__  
__“In the wake of the Cloud’s destruction, technology yet crept on forward. For humanity would not be denied our yearning for God. We reached for him, with synapse and servo. And now, we live in an age where we can connect on a level previously unheard of._ _  
__  
__“Humanity created the datajack. Humanity created the simsense chip. And through these marvels of technology, we can Commune._ _  
__  
__“We are the pieces of a broken God. Come forward, my children, and leave behind your loneliness and despair. Surrender yourselves to the Communion, and be made whole.”_ _  
_  
~*~  
  
The converted warehouse wasn’t lacking for space. Surprisingly, neither was it lacking for furnishing. In lieu of church pews, the space was filled by an array of mismatched chairs, and those chairs were filled with people- street rats, the homeless, corporate wageslaves in rumpled suits.  
  
Religion, even fringe cults like this one, drew all types, it seemed.  
  
David adjusted his scope, watching as the congregation rose to line up in the center aisle. At the head of the line, an attendant in white held a plastic tub, and those at the head of the line reached inside, took something, and returned to their seats.  
  
Behind them, a portly dwarf in a cassock stood with his hands behind his back, a beatific smile on his face. ‘Father Servo’, David presumed.  
  
David frowned, focusing his scope. He exhaled, sliding into astral space.  
  
The charcoal-gray of the real world slid back, exposing the brilliant colors of life and magic. The auras of the congregation were tattered, not the shadows of cybernetic implants deadening magic but the fraying that stress had on the soul.  
  
A curious effect was spreading through the crowd, however. As the people received Communion and returned to their seats, a thread of electrical blue light appeared in their auras, linking them both to each other and to the man at the altar.  
  
David had seen this sort of networked aura before. During the attack on Glory’s safehouse, where the branded man, Flint, had lines of fire-red linking his astral signature with his mob of mercenaries… and the attack drones he had rigged into.  
  
That… shouldn’t be possible.  
  
David frowned and watched, scope clicking…  
  
~*~  
  
Glory stood on the docks, her new coat billowing in a seaborne breeze. The moon peeked through the clouds and glinted off the metalwork on the Rose Compass’s casing, the engraving that could have been a rose and could have been a flame. Glory clicked it open. The red-and-gold needle spun wildly in place.  
  
The Heart of Feuerstelle walked across the inside of Glory’s eyelids, his stag-skull blazing with sapphire light, his broad, muscular chest draped in crawling ivy. Glory took a deep breath, taking in not the salty sea air but the sweet scent of honeysuckle and spring.  
  
The Heart’s voice rumbled through her head, a sound like approaching rain.  
  
_He is here._  
  
Glory exhaled, snapping the Rose Compass shut and tucking it away. Her steel fingers coiled around the grip of her revolver.  
  
Then she smashed through the front door, her revolver leveled straight down the center aisle at the man at the altar.  
  
“Father Servo!” Glory cried, fire in her voice.  
  
“Hello, child,” Father Servo said, smiling, as a hundred blank eyes turned to face Glory in unison.  
  
“Have you come to join the Communion?”  
  
~*~  
  
There was sound beside him and David jerked away from his scope, hand flying to his pistol.  
  
David cried out and screwed his eyes shut. He caught a glimpse- just a glimpse- of something vast and blinding, like staring through a rifle scope right into the sun. The inferno seared itself into his eyelids, and he gasped, vision blurring back into realspace.  
  
Then a robed arm reached out from behind him and clamped around David’s neck.  
  
~*~  
  
“What have you done to these people?” Glory demanded.  
  
“Like I said,” Servo shrugged, crossing his arms across his chest. “We are the pieces of a broken God. If we get closer to each other, then we get closer to God. And you cannot get much closer to your fellow man than by surrendering yourself to a networked mind. A collective unconsciousness, if you would. The successor to the Cloud.”  
  
“I’m shutting you down, ‘Father Servo’,” Glory said. “But first, I want answers.”  
  
“So do all who come to my humble service,” Servo said, smiling that infuriating smile of his. “They come to me because they feel lost and alone, insignificant. They come to me because they want to feel like their life holds meaning. That if they are but a cog in a vast machine, they are still fulfilling some vital purpose. They come to me with that wish, and, through the miracle of modern technology, I grant it to them. That is the Communion. I explained all this a moment ago, child. You wouldn’t have missed it if you weren’t late for service.”  
  
Glory glowered at him, chancing a glance at the banners draped across the walls, banners of the Communion and the Broken God. They were done in the style of technical schematics, white outlines on blue fields, but hidden in the design was the unmistakable sign- antlers, and a flame.  
  
“I know who you are,” Glory spat. “I know who you really serve. And hijacking a room full of people through their chipjacks doesn’t seem fitting for a so-called god of anarchy and freedom.”  
  
“Humanity always craves a choice, or at least the illusion of one,” Servo smiled. “But the Horned King does as he wills.”  
  
The congregation stared at Glory, their eyes dull, their limbs slack. But Father Servo’s eyes glinted like a flame. She pressed her lips into a line.  
  
“Let these people go.”  
  
“Please, child. These people are here because they _chose_ to be. Can _you_ say the same?”  
  
Servo twitched his fingers, and as one, the congregation rose to their feet. He smiled.  
  
“Brothers and sisters, kindly escort Miss Glory from the premises. She’s disrupting our service.”  
  
Glory lowered her aim as the enthralled crowd advanced towards her and around her, cutting her off from the pulpit in front of her and the door behind. Glory hissed a curse and thrust her revolver back in its holster. She raised her hands in a fighting stance, fingers splayed by reflex- before she called back her hand razors into their mechanical sheathes, curling her hands into fists.  
  
The crowd pressed in around her, limp and erratic, like puppets on strings. A man stepped forward, a wageslave in a button-down shirt and a crooked tie.  
  
“All will be one,” he said, as he threw the first punch, the words, and the blow, echoed by the crowd.  
  
~*~  
  
The scent of the sea, salty and wet, lingered in the air. But it was joined by another, fainter smell- one of a campfire, flint and ash.  
  
David gasped awake, reflexively pulling the hands from his throat. A woman skittered away, startled, her fingertips still glowing with the blue traces of healing magic.  
  
David blinked, his vision settling.  
  
“Sister Magdalene?”  
  
She nodded in the moonlight, robed in midnight blue. “Are you alright?” she asked.  
  
There was a dozen questions he could have, should have asked. But none of them came to mind. David shouldered his fallen rifle and sighted down the scope, Glory’s name an urgent whisper across his lips.  
  
~*~  
  
Glory grimaced as half a dozen men broke their knuckles against her cyber-arms, their dull, blank expressions not reacting in any way to the pain. A man came at her from behind and she flipped him over her shoulder, slamming him to the floor. She fought the impulse to snap his neck under her boot.  
  
Two more men went for her legs and she fell to her knees, two more looping their arms around her neck. She fought and struggled, smothered by the sea of bodies. Everywhere she looked, she saw the dead-eyed expression of men enthralled. They were puppets, just puppets, their blank faces eerily disconnected from the aggression of their bodies.  
  
Glory smashed her head backwards, breaking someone’s nose, throwing her arms forward and pitching them into the crowd. The crowd trampled them underfoot, undeterred, surging forward. Glory kicked out knees, broke noses and chopped throats, but it wasn’t enough. It was like fighting a crowd hopped up on stims; pain alone wouldn’t stop them.  
  
And all the while, Father Servo watched her struggle, safe and sound on his pulpit only twenty feet away.  
  
Glory growled in frustration. One hand settled around the grip of her revolver. The other splayed her fingers, extending her claws-  
  
A shot rang out. It struck Servo hard enough to pitch him off the dais, trailing arcs of blue lightning.  
  
Glory recoiled as a catastrophic chain reaction flashed through the congregation. The crowd shivered and convulsed, the air filling with the sound of sparking metal and the acrid tang of burning plastic. After an agonizing moment, the crowd slumped, puppets with their strings cut. Soon after came chaos- believers clutching at real wounds and phantom pains, cries of pain, fear, confusion, all rising up in a cacophony of mounting panic.  
  
Then three shots cut through the noise.  
  
“Everyone out!” Glory barked, revolver aimed at the ceiling. The crowd practically bowled her over in their haste to comply, some of them limping or leaning on shoulders as they scattered out into the night.  
  
Picking his way through the dispersing crowd, David joined Glory in the warehouse, now all-but empty save for Father Servo and a mess of overturned chairs.  
  
“I’m sorry, boss,” David said. “I got tied up.”  
  
“Not literally, I hope,” Glory replied, and, like always, David couldn’t tell if she was joking or not.  
  
There was a bang and a puff of smoke from the corner of the warehouse and the two snapped to attention, training their guns on the newcomer. A figure stepped out of the smoke, robed in white and red. David blinked, his aim wavering for an instant.  
  
“Sister Ashe?”  
  
“Poor girl,” Ashe said, fixing her gaze on Glory, barely sparing David a second glance. “It’s bad manners to interrupt a church service, you know.”  
  
Ashe pulled back her veil. Her hair tumbled out, spilling across her shoulders- an unnatural fire-red, glowing like embers. More than that, however, was the brand- the mark of the Firepact, seared into the skin of her throat. Antlers, cradling a flame. Just like the man, with his drones, and his mob.  
  
“Who are you?” Glory demanded. “Who was the man who attacked me two days ago?”  
  
Ashe laughed- uproarious, mocking laughter.  
  
“You don’t know a damn thing, do you? You carve a bloody swath through our operations and you don’t even have a clue what you’re really up against. Well, allow me to do you a favor,” Ashe grinned, a wild, manic look in her eyes. “We are the Branded. Six jewels in the crown of the Horned King. And you, foolish girl, are just a child, far from home.”  
  
Glory swallowed.  
  
“Where’s Harrow?”  
  
Ashe barked with laughter. “You’re out of your depth, child. What, did you think you would just kill your way through half of Europe’s occultists and hope you just _ran into him_ along the way? Foolish girl. No plan. No hope. No _chance_. For all the bodies you’ve left in your wake, all you’ve done is follow a trail of breadcrumbs to the witch’s lair.”  
  
Glory swallowed hard. It was true, she was no information broker. She had relied so much on the Rose Compass and her own intuition… maybe-  
  
No. She’d made it this far. And she’d make it further.  
  
Servo stirred from his spot on the floor. He clutched his head, electricity still shivering through his form. He groaned, rising to his feet.  
  
“Ugh… what, uh, what’s going on?”  
  
Then, in a blink, there was a knife against his neck- a blade of carved obsidian, with a hilt made of coiled wire. A ritual athame.  
  
“Your prototype was a success,” Ashe said, crouching behind him, pressing the knife into his throat. “The Horned King thanks you for your service.”  
  
Servo glanced up, before fixing his gaze on Glory and David, a dreadful serenity on his face.  
  
“Then I pledge myself to the Pact,” Servo smiled. “Until my soul sleeps, and my body burns.”  
  
“Now burn,” Ashe said, reverent, as she swiped the blade aside.  
  
Servo’s body writhed and convulsed as a geyser of blood and black smoke erupted from his throat. It rose into the air. It bubbled, it melted, it _transformed_ \- until Servo’s body was twisted and inverted, vomited back out through the crack in reality torn open at his throat.  
  
A beast coalesced from the smoke, dripping oil. It was a squat, lumbering thing, with almost comically small legs compared to its monstrous, muscled torso. A flame took hold above its head and consumed the beast, blazing like a torch, its skull-like face crested with antlers.  
  
A beast, born of the pact, crowned in fire.  
  
_Daemon._  
  
David gawked at the creature born from Servo’s corpse, eyes wide, mouth open. He worked his jaw, as if to say something, but couldn’t find the words.  
  
“David!”  
  
Glory’s voice cut through the shock.  
  
The daemon surged forward, a beast of sinew and flame. It drank in their gunfire, stun rounds bursting into flickers of electricity, hard rounds evaporating as they struck its burning hide. It crashed into David, slamming him backwards into a wall, pinning him with a massive fist.  
  
David gagged, smoke filling his lungs, mighty fingers crushing the life from his bones. His vision swam, and he screwed his eyes shut, unable to watch himself die.  
  
There was an explosion before him. The shockwave hit him like a spring breeze, filled with honeysuckle.  
  
Glory appeared in front of him, her claws splayed. David gasped.  
  
Soft green light suffused her form and coated her claws. Threads of emerald light traced their way up her arms and into her back, where a sigil in the shape of a tree shone along her spine.  
  
She was…  
  
A flaming fist crashed down. Glory batted it away in an explosion of green light and flying embers, her claws striking the daemon’s fist like a mallet against a gong.  
  
“David, look at me!” She called out, coat-tails flaring in the wind. “It’s just a spirit. It’s just a toxic fire spirit! That’s all it is!”  
  
Glory turned, slapping aside another blow, her claws shining green. She danced out of the way as the daemon drove both its fists into the ground, a hammerblow that exploded the warehouse’s eastern wall in a wave of energy.  
  
David darted to one side, dropping his spent clip and switching to hard rounds. The ground shook with every blow the daemon made, and it was all he could do to keep his footing. Daemon, spirit, whatever it was, his hardware wasn’t cutting it. He reached out, groping blindly, searching for something, anything-  
  
His hand knocked into something dense and made of metal. David looked up.  
  
“Glory!” He called.  
  
Glory leapt out of the way of another bonecrushing blow, rolling into a crouch. She got up, catching David’s eyes. The daemon roared and surged their way.  
  
Glory closed her augmetic grip around the fire extinguisher, hurling it into the daemon’s mouth like a grenade. David tracked it through the air, aimed, and fired.  
  
The fire extinguisher exploded in a cloud of pressurized carbon dioxide. The daemon writhed and roared in pain and frustration, a shadow in the smoke.  
  
Glory’s hand closed around David’s wrist and she yanked him out the door.  
  
They emerged from the ruined, burning warehouse, trailing a pillar of smoke like the marker on a mass grave. Mere moments later, the daemon burst out of the smoke, its flesh reigniting in the crisp air. Burning hoofbeats struck the pavement and left smoldering craters in the street.    
  
Glory and David ran, trying not to notice the nightmare bearing down on them.  
  
“We can’t just leave this thing loose in the city!” David cried, breathless.  
  
“Do I look like a mage to you?!” Glory snapped.  
  
They darted in opposite directions as the daemon slammed a fist into the pavement, sending up an explosion of gravel and flying embers.  
  
The daemon turned, cornering Glory in an alley. A fist came crashing down. She crossed her arms above her head, the impact jarring every bone in her body, her legs buckling beneath the creature’s impossible, otherworldly weight. She cried out, straining, hissing in pain and frustration.  
  
_Poplar…!_  
  
The daemon stopped in its tracks, letting out a puzzled growl. Then it shrieked as it was dragged back out of the alley and into the street.  
  
Glory gasped as the weight eased on her arms, her cybernetics sparking and popping under her coat, while her coat remained improbably immaculate. She hurried out into the street.  
  
Chains of solidified mana hung in the air, bound to a magic circle two storeys high. The chains looped around the daemon’s limbs, and the daemon fought against its bonds, howling and roaring in defiance. The chains snapped taut, hurling the beast backwards until it was crucified against the glyph of shining sapphire light, magic thrumming in the air.  
  
A woman stood in the street, robe billowing in an otherworldly wind, hands shining blue, sweat streaking her face.  
  
“His heart,” Magdalene gasped, straining. “Quickly!”  
  
Glory nodded, running for the nearest fire escape and launching herself up. She scrabbled up onto the roof, smoke and fire stinging her eyes. She flexed her claws, shining with the power gifted her by the Heart of Feuerstelle.  
  
She’d only get one shot.  
  
Magdalene’s magic circle pulsed with energy, the chains pulling as taut as they could, arms and legs pulled back to expose its chest and the magical core set within it like a jewel.  
  
Glory felt her vision sharpen, and the stinging ease from her eyes. On the streets below, David stood, pistol in one hand, the other raised in a sign of blessing, fingertips shining white.  
  
_All will be one,_ the Heart whispered in her head.  
  
Glory took a running start and leapt off the roof, coat flaring behind her like a red-tailed hawk. She reached out her hand, claws flashing with emerald light.  
  
She tore the daemon open in a single ragged slice from shoulder to hip.  
  
The daemon convulsed, light spilling from the awful wound like molten silver. It shrieked and twisted, deforming, shrinking, collapsing and folding in on itself until it was no larger than a lump of coal-  
  
And then it exploded, hurling Glory, David, and Magdalene off their feet, and filling the air with soot, ash, and the faint scent of honeysuckle.  
  
David sat on the pavement in a daze, shaking the ringing from his ears. The Church of the Broken God burned fitfully a few blocks away, with a trail of flaming craters seared into the asphalt. Across the way, Magdalene was shivering and shaking, doubtlessly from magic drain.  
  
David got to his feet, pulling his rifle onto his shoulder. Glory was getting to her feet, and going to Magdalene’s side. David stood there, swaying, leaning on the wall behind him. He had a lot to take in. Father Servo, Sister Ashe, the knife, the summoning, the daemon. Questions bubbled and brewed inside him, but he said nothing. He only watched the emotion in Glory’s face- her lips, her eyes, her brow. He was curious, of course. He had questions. But those would have to wait.  
  
Magdalene was trembling. But Glory stepped forward and slowly, tenderly, took the other woman’s shoulders, and her shaking stopped. Their eyes met, and they smiled, but they were pained smiles- ones tinged with both happiness and grief.  
  
“I didn’t think I would see you again,” Glory said flatly, though her eyes were wet.  
  
“Yes, you did,” Magdalene said.  
  
"...Yes," Glory said. "I did."  
  
Magdalene reached up and pulled back her monastic veil. Her hair, long and raven-black, spilled down over her shoulders. She was an elf, with amber eyes and a certain charm- a familiar, wordless allure. Magic shivered the air around her, and the tips of her hair glowed like hot coals.  
  
“Hello, Glory,” Magdalene whispered.  
  
“Hello, Marta,” Glory breathed.  
  
~*~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If I'm going to be perfectly honest I wrote this chapter for two reasons: so I could give Glory a cool new outfit, and so I could write the next one. So, to that end, I hope you enjoyed the beginnings of Glory and David's partnership, and a reunion that was a long time coming; and I hope you'll all look forward to joining me for Chapter Three: The Devil's Wife. I hope you all enjoyed the read!


	3. The Devil's Wife

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Marta. Glory's ex-lover, and the bright lure that drew her into Harrow's clutches. A year ago, Glory and Poplar broke into Feuerstelle and saved Marta and a slew of acolytes from Harrow's poisonous influence. Now Marta has returned, a ghost from Glory's past, and in her wake follow demons of her own...

~*~ _  
_  
_Der Feuerstelle. The Fireplace. A log cabin tucked away in the wooded heart of Schonbuch Forest, lit from within by a warm, inviting glow._ _  
__  
__Despite its rustic appearances, make no mistake. This place was a castle, and Harrow, its king._ _  
__  
__And today, his acolytes- his loyal subjects- were gathering in the main lounge, crowding around the spoils of Glory’s latest ‘expedition’._ _  
__  
__The new trid player dominated the wall of the lounge. It was almost comically ostentatious, starkly at odds with the lodge’s wood-panelled floors and bearskin rugs. Never mind that Harrow had stolen it from a dead man. Never mind that Glory had been the one who killed him._ _  
__  
__The acolytes didn’t care. They chattered amongst themselves, babbling in excitement. Harrow himself stood in their midst, his arms wide, drinking in their praise, their blind adoration._ _  
__  
__“Let it not be said that I do not provide for my people,” Harrow said, lips curled into a toxic grin._ _  
__  
__Glory lingered in the corner of the room, shying away from the spotlight. Marta sidled up beside her, curling an arm around her waist. She lay her head on Glory’s shoulder, smiling into her throat._ _  
__  
__“That was quite the prize,” Marta cooed. “The initiates will love it.”_ _  
__  
__“I don’t know,” Glory teased. “I think they just love_ ** _him_** _.”_ _  
__  
__Harrow gestured, and the crowd of acolytes parted before him. He bowed deeply at the waist in a grand gesture, a caricature of reverence._ _  
__  
__“My queens,” he said, grinning up at the duo. “Let it not be said that I do not provide for you, either.”_ _  
__  
__He tipped his chin to the picture hanging on the wall- the other newest addition to the main lounge. Glory and Marta turned and gazed up at themselves, captured in acrylic and framed on the wall, the frame itself embossed with an icon below- a pair of antlers, cradling a flame._ _  
__  
__“Never forget that it was I who made this sanctuary for you,” Harrow said, addressing the crowd. “And never forget who it was who found you on the street, those who lifted you out of suffering and brought you here. Marta. Glory. My queens; my wives. My left and right hands.”_ _  
__  
__Harrow smiled an intoxicating smile. Marta and Glory parted, obediently draping themselves on either arm. Their hair was dyed crimson, the mark of Harrow’s favor. But in astral space, their hair was fire-red, blazing like a crown..._  
  
~*~  
  
Glory woke with a gasp, her steel knuckles digging into her cheek. She’d only dozed off for a moment, but she didn’t dream; ever since the surgery, Glory never dreamed. She only remembered. And there were some things she would never forget.  
  
Glory sighed, blowing away the memory like a mote of dust straying near her face.  
  
They had needed a place to lay low after the commotion they’d made at the docks. David took them to the first place that came to mind- which was why Glory and Marta were sitting across from one another in the attic of a local bar, music thrumming under their feet, the sound of clinking glasses drifting up from below.  
  
Despite the noise, a dreadful quiet had settled between them. David reached down and placed two cups of soykaf on the table, to muted thanks. He put his hands in his pockets, fidgeting.  
  
“I’ll, um. I’ll go keep watch,” David said, before wandering off.  
  
Glory watched as Marta reached forward and took the cup. She didn’t take a sip; she just held it, her hands clasped as if in prayer.  
  
Glory had read somewhere that holding a warm beverage stimulates the same part of the brain as human contact. That when you’re lost, or lonely, holding a warm cup is almost like holding hands.  
  
Not her hands, though. _Her_ hands were cold steel.  
  
Marta was still wearing the midnight-blue robe of the Church of the Nameless Queen, the sign of Venus hanging around her neck like an ankh. But she’d ditched her veil, exposing her hair, and she wore her robe open, like a long coat, over her street clothes. Her hair spilled across her shoulders, dark and undyed, though the tips still held a red that wouldn’t wash out, glowing like embers to the magic in her veins.  
  
She was beautiful, Glory thought. She was _still_ beautiful, after all these years. But she was no longer the honey trap, the bright lure that drew her, and who knew who many others, into the gaping maw of Der Feuerstelle. Gone was the intoxicating allure, the treacherous torchlight drawing moths to the flame. Instead, hers was a haunted beauty, a sadness behind every smile- she was Penelope gazing out at the coast, kissed by the seaborne breeze.  
  
Marta survived Harrow, just like Glory. She survived, but was not unscathed. And seeing her now… Glory didn’t know what to think. They were dark mirrors of each other, rust red and midnight blue.  
  
“I can’t believe you’re here,” Marta began, breaking the uneasy quiet. “It’s… it’s so good to see you, Glory. Running into you like this, purely by chance? It feels like a dream. It feels like… like…”  
  
“Providence?” Glory offered.  
  
“...Yeah,” Marta breathed. “You, um. You look great, by the way. That coat looks fantastic on you.”  
  
“Thanks,” Glory smiled in her eyes, not quite reaching her mouth. “It was a gift.”  
  
“I wanted to call,” Marta said. “I promised you I would, after I had time to… figure things out. I tried, but then Saeder-Krupp moved on Berlin, and I didn’t- I didn’t know. I didn’t know where to find you. I was so scared, Glory. I didn’t know if you were…”  
  
“Here I am,” Glory said.  
  
Marta swallowed. Nodded. “Here you are.”  
  
Marta took a sip of soykaf, uneasy quiet hanging between them. Glory gazed at her, unblinking, her brown eyes ringed with red- a legacy of the magic she held, what felt like a lifetime ago.  
  
“You have a new totem,” Glory said. It wasn’t a question.  
  
“I do,” Marta said, reflexively touching the icon around her neck. “The Nameless Queen, embodiment of divine womanhood. All goddesses are one within her. My matron, my, um, sponsor, if you would, is Hecate. Goddess of magic, and the crossroads- where one road becomes three.”  
  
“Fitting,” Glory mused.  
  
“I thought so,” Marta smiled. “What about you? You have a new totem, too.”  
  
“I’m no shaman. Not anymore.”  
  
“But there’s a spirit bound to you,” Marta said, “I can see it, in your heart.”  
  
And, indeed, she could. In the shadows of astral space, Glory’s cybernetics deadened her astral signature until she was no more than a silhouette, a phantom- save for the green fire in her heart. Within that flame lurked a man, strongly built, with olive skin and a stag’s skull for a head, draped in crawling ivy and smelling of spring and honeysuckle. His was, by all means, a comforting sight. But Glory’s voice yanked Marta back into realspace.  
  
“ _Ask_ before you read me,” Glory snapped.  
  
“I- I’m sorry,” Marta said.  
  
A chilly quiet settled between them once again. Eventually, Glory sighed, her expression softening.  
  
“He is the Heart of Feuerstelle,” Glory explained. “Do you remember? A year ago, when I broke into Feuerstelle-”  
  
“Of course I remember,” Marta said. “When Harrow being a liar and a con artist just wasn’t enough, he turned to toxic magic to keep us in line. And then you came back. The prodigal child. You came back, and set us free. Me, the kids… and that spirit, bound to his service.”  
  
Marta exhaled. She looked up.  
  
“That man with you now. Was he part of your old team?”  
  
Glory shook her head. “That’s David. He’s new.”  
  
“What happened to your team? What happened to the woman who was with you when you came back to Feuerstelle a year ago?”  
  
“Poplar? She…” Glory hesitated. “She’s… still around. Still leading the team. When S-K took over Berlin, we managed to get away. One of us stayed behind, tried to fight it.” Glory’s expression dimmed. “...You can imagine how that turned out.”  
  
“I’m so sorry, Glory,” Marta said.  
  
“It’s how he would’ve wanted it,” Glory shrugged. “Poplar found us a new place. A new info broker. Even had some new work lined up…”  
  
“But…?” Marta asked.  
  
“But I had to leave,” Glory said. “If I stayed, I knew I’d stay forever. So I had to leave. I had to find Harrow, and see this through.”  
  
Glory heaved a weary sigh, combing her fingers through her hair.  
  
“Then… then things got complicated. Then I found out that Feuerstelle was only one small branch of a really big, really fucked up tree. The Firepact is much bigger than Harrow. I spent months tracking down and wiping out cells where I could, but Harrow’s always been just out of reach. Now I’m getting notorious enough for them to send assassins after me. I’m almost flattered.”  
  
“But David’s been with you for all that, right?”  
  
“No,” Glory said. “I only met David a few days ago.”  
  
“Glory,” Marta pressed, “you’re telling me you’ve been hunting Harrow- been targeted by _assassins_ \- and you’ve faced this all alone?”  
  
Glory closed her eyes and took a deep breath. The slightest breeze ruffled her hair and filled the air with honeysuckle, her hand reflexively rising to her heart.  
  
“Not alone,” Glory said.  
  
“No. Not alone,” Marta said, rising to her feet. “Not anymore. Take me with you, Glory.”  
  
Glory grit her teeth, a warning creeping into her tone.  
  
“The last time I took you with me, Marta, I almost had to kill you. You were fine with Poplar and I purifying the Heart of Feuerstelle. You were fine with Poplar and I getting Harrow’s initiates out of there. But as soon as we even mentioned going after Harrow himself, you snapped and turned on us.”  
  
“But then you purified the Heart,” Marta reasoned, “and I came to my senses.”  
  
Glory exhaled. “Marta…”  
  
“Please, Glory,” Marta begged, leaning over her in her chair. “I want Harrow brought to justice as much as you do. And I don’t want _you_ facing all this danger by yourself. Take me with you, Glory, and we can hunt him down. Together.”  
  
Marta was so close. Glory looked up at her, meeting her amber eyes, the edges stained with red, marked by Harrow’s influence just as Glory’s were. Memories flicked past Glory’s eyes- laughter, secrets, adrenaline, heat, two little fingers curled in a promise- but, like their eyes, these echoes were stained, poisoned, touched with fire and soot.  
  
Glory stood, holding Marta’s longing gaze. She reached up and traced a finger along Marta’s cheek, and down her jaw. With hands made of military-grade steel and ceramite, the gesture felt halfway between loving and a threat.  
  
Glory saw the question in Marta’s eyes.  
  
“Marta…” Glory breathed. “I know this isn’t what you want. But I… I don’t know.”  
  
Marta nodded.  
  
“I understand. I’m gone for a year, and suddenly I show up out of the blue. After everything that’s happened, I can’t just expect-”  
  
“Stop that,” Glory said. “Just come here.”  
  
They embraced, Marta’s arms around Glory’s neck, Glory’s coiled around Marta’s waist. Marta gasped, blinking away tears of bittersweet relief. She tucked Glory’s head under her chin, her fingers curling through Glory’s long, dark hair.  
  
Despite the cool metal of Glory’s cybernetics, she was a flame in Marta’s hands. She was real, and warm, and alive.  
  
The Rose Compass in Glory’s coat pocket was oblivious to this heartfelt reunion. It shone golden-red, like a torch, or a warning, its finely engraved needle spinning wildly in place…  
  
~*~  
  
Across the city, a mob was forming. But there were no torches and pitchforks, no passionate rhetoric, no hateful cries- only an eerie, shuffling quiet of blank-eyed street punks and salarymen lining up for a riot in nice, orderly lines.  
  
Firepact Agent Flint sat on a defunct newspaper box, sipping whiskey straight from the bottle. After one last unsatisfying sip, he tossed the half-empty bottle into the crowd. A middle-aged office drone caught it, tore a strip of fabric from his shirt, and stuffed the wick down the bottleneck, all without changing his blank expression or looking anywhere but straight ahead.  
  
Sister Ashe appeared, looking resplendent in white and red, though her robe was staining black with soot.  
  
“We lost Servo,” Ashe said, lightly.  
  
Flint sniffed. “Not much of a loss.”  
  
“That’s cold.”  
  
“It’s true,” Flint shrugged. “The Communion Project was a waste of time. Overriding people and controlling them through their chipjacks… Pfft. So high-brow. So roundabout. You don’t need all those fancy gadgets to get your way. You just need a little money, and a little charisma.”  
  
“We can’t all speak the Word, Flint,” Ashe chided. “We can’t all be so _charismatic_.”  
  
“ _You_ can,” Flint grinned lecherously. “Why don’t you tug down that collar, and show me some _charisma_?”  
  
“I think I’d rather fuck one of your thralls,” Ashe spat. “At least they don’t _talk_. Now listen up, numbskull. Orders came down from the top. We have a second target now- another traitor to the cause. She was seen fleeing the mess at the docks along with our primary.”  
  
“Don’t you mean _your_ mess at the docks?” Flint drawled.  
  
“You mean, after _your_ mess in the commercial district?” Ashe sniped. “We can do this all day, meathead. But we have our orders, from Harrow himself. Apparently, he had _history_ with these two.”  
  
Flint groaned, getting to his feet and shoving his hands in his pockets.  
  
“Gee. What an appropriate and effective use of the Pact’s resources, sending the Branded against his ex-wives.”  
  
“Why are you so grumpy?” Ashe asked. “Still mad that the girl made a mess of your drones?”  
  
Flint shrugged, gesturing to the massed ranks of blank-eyed thralls crowding the street.  
  
“There are always more pawns.”  
  
Flint stepped forward, his mob following in his wake with limp, shaky steps, mere puppets on strings. The brick walls and wooden eaves of a church rose above them, its steeple crowned with a cross and a ring- the sign of Venus, icon of the Nameless Queen.  
  
Flint pulled a lighter out of his coat pocket and tossed it into the crowd behind him. A thrall caught it, bearing the wick-stuffed bottle of whiskey Flint had given him earlier. A ripple spread through the crowd as a dozen other thralls produced bottles, wicks, and lighters of their own.  
  
“Ignite,” Flint ordered.  
  
~*~  
  
_“We’re coming to you live from Halcyon City’s northern sprawl, where what appears to be a chemical fire has broken out along the harbor’s shipping district. The warehouse where the blaze began seemed to be abandoned however, and as of now, no corporation has stepped forward to claim the damages…”_ _  
_  
David watched grainy drone footage of the fire at the docks, the aftermath of their fight with Sister Ashe’s summoned daemon, presented by an improbably handsome news anchor who’d likely never set foot in the sprawl. Black-bordered captions scrolled up the screen, just out of sync with the pantomiming host, while obnoxiously loud bar music throbbed in his ears. David buried his head in his arms with a groan.  
  
The bartender, a rotund woman with warm brown skin and an even warmer smile, merely grinned and turned the music down a few notches.  
  
“Everything alright there, kiddo?” She asked.  
  
David propped his chin up on his crossed arms. “Hey, Shanti. No, Shanti.”  
  
“Relationship troubles?”  
  
David quirked his lip, indignant. “Must _everyone_ leap to that conclusion? She’s my _boss_.”  
  
“Easy mistake,” Shanti shrugged. “A kid, a nun, and a chromed-up stranger walk into my bar…”  
  
“I’m not a kid anymore, Shanti,” David pouted. “I’m turning _thirty_ in a couple weeks.”  
  
“You’re under _my_ roof, you’re still a kid,” Shanti smiled.  
  
“Mm,” David hummed. “I’m sorry to come by on such short notice. Thanks for letting us use the attic for a little bit.”  
  
“Now, you look at me, child,” Shanti said, leaning on the bar counter. “Are you in some kind of trouble?”  
  
“Shanti, I promise you, we weren’t followed-”  
  
“That’s not what I’m asking,” Shanti pressed. “David, are you in trouble?”  
  
“I… No,” David swallowed. “No. It’s a job. It’s just a job.”  
  
“If I hear you’ve joined those damned Hammerheads, I _will_ kick your ass.”  
  
David chuckled, although he knew Shanti could very well do it. “No, Shanti. But I am going to be leaving the city for awhile. Work’s taking me on the road.”  
  
“And how long have you been working for this woman?”  
  
David blinked, and cleared his throat. “Um. About, uh… two days.”  
  
“Glory, child,” Shanti threw up her hands. “Where are you running to in such a hurry?”  
  
David stared down at the counter, tracing the grain of the wood with his eyes. Shanti watched him, one hand on her hip, her brow creasing with worry.  
  
“Or…” Shanti said, “is there something you’re running _from_?”  
  
“Don’t worry about me, Shanti. Everything’s fine.”  
  
David’s eyes flicked over to the stairwell, where Glory appeared, silent, inscrutable. He swallowed.  
  
“...Everything’s fine, right?”  
  
~*~  
  
Up in the attic, the noise of the bar below faded to a muffled, almost reverent, quiet. David and Glory lingered by the stairs, while Marta sat in a far corner, hands clasped, praying or napping, David couldn’t tell. He couldn’t blame her, either; it had been a long night. And he had the creeping suspicion it was only going to get longer.  
  
“You were never properly introduced,” Glory said. “This is Marta. She’s… an old friend.”  
  
“I’d seen her around the Church,” David said. “She was always Sister Magdalene to me. I didn’t know you knew her. Lucky you ran into her here.”  
  
“Too lucky,” Glory said. “Remember the woman from the docks? The summoner?”  
  
“Sister Ashe?” David asked. His lips curled into a frown. “...Glory, the Sisters don’t-”  
  
“Have anything to do with the Firepact?” Glory asked sharply. “When one of the Sisters is Harrow’s ex-wife? When another Sister is Branded, one of the Firepact elite?”  
  
David exhaled. He pressed his lips into a line.  
  
“Maybe Sister Ashe was a plant,” he reasoned. “A spy, acting on her own.”  
  
Glory raised and lowered one shoulder. “Maybe.”  
  
“I refuse to believe that the Church of the Nameless Queen is just a front for some cult mafia.”  
  
Glory fixed David with her eerie, unblinking gaze. She lifted her hands, palms out, by means of apology.  
  
“...Nothing is certain,” Glory exhaled. “Personally, I hope you’re right. Maybe Ashe was just hiding in plain sight, with none of the Sisters the wiser. There’s no point in speculating now. If the Firepact is sending assassins after me, I take it that means I’m gaining ground, and getting too close for comfort. We need to pick up Harrow’s trail and get moving again. We need to get out of the city.”  
  
David nodded, his gaze turning to Marta’s form, still but restless, at the far end of the room.  
  
“What about her?” he asked.  
  
“Marta… wants to join us.”  
  
“Oh,” David blinked. “That’s good. That’s good, right? We could use the help. I’m sure you could use the company.”  
  
“I’ll thank you not to comment on my social life,” Glory said flatly. “Read her.”  
  
David swallowed. He blinked, and his vision slid into astral space, the dim light of the attic fading into charcoal-gray shadows, the light of life blazing like fireworks. Glory was a phantom beside him, a hole in the world where a person should be, save for the shining emerald flame of her heart, and the spirit bound to it.  
  
Glory’s Essence was a shredded, tattered mess only just gathered together into a threadbare whole, contained within a web of green light. Marta’s Essence unfurled like waves on the shore, in ocean blue and seafoam green, but it still showed signs of scarring- the lingering effects of some foul, hateful presence that seared David’s mind’s eye and made him flinch away.  
  
“She’s whole,” David said, slipping back into realspace. “More or less. But her edges are frayed, like, like the singed edges of a paper held too close to a flame. There’s a mark there, like a scar-”  
  
“Or a brand,” Glory finished. “The mark of The Horned King.”  
  
David turned, meeting Glory’s eyes. “...Glory… you don’t think she’s-”  
  
“I don’t know what to think, David,” Glory exhaled. “I know that the Horned King left its mark on both of us. I know that the Horned King had one of his servants hiding out at the Church of the Nameless Queen. I know that the Horned King isn’t above forcing obedience when words aren’t enough.”  
  
Glory’s stare grew flinty and hard.  
  
“...I know that, years ago, the Horned King took control of me, and tricked me into doing something unforgivable. I know that I got this surgery and mutilated my Essence, buried my magic under steel and chrome, so he would never have that power over me again.”  
  
“But Marta still has her Essence,” David said. “She doesn’t have that protection.”  
  
“No,” Glory agreed, her voice low. “She doesn’t.”  
  
David stuck his thumbs through his belt loops, heaving a sigh. “Glory. I think-”  
  
David’s commlink chirped, sharp and shrill in the attic’s restless quiet. He glanced at Glory, sheepish.  
  
“Sorry,” he muttered, lifting a hand to his earpiece. “Hello-”  
  
_“David!”_ Petra’s harried voice crashed into his ear. _“It’s Petra. Have you-”_  
  
“Didn’t you say this was a private frequency?”  
  
_“And who made those comms for you, numbnuts? Just shut up for a second. Have you seen the news? Did you hear about the fire?”_  
  
“Yeah. Uh. We ran into some trouble on the docks-”  
  
_“Forget the docks. The Church! The Sisters are under attack!”_  
  
~*~  
  
Fire exploded across the Church of the Nameless Queen. Firebombs crashed against the steeple, the roof, the walls, the lawn, stoking a bonfire that few would escape. Smoke choked the air as flames raced across the complex, engulfing the library, the kitchen, the shelter. The city’s homeless rose from fitful sleep and awoke to a nightmare, of dancing fire and curling smoke, of phantoms standing in the flames.  
  
The Sisters and their wards woke in a panic, fear and confusion sweeping through their ranks just as steadily as the flame. And in the midst of the calamity, the horror, Flint’s mob stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the blocks around the church, penning them in for the slaughter.  
  
Ashe stood before the statue of the Nameless Queen in the church’s main lobby. A female form, seated, tranquil, her face hidden behind a veil. A goddess. Every goddess. All the aspects of womanhood, raised to the divine.  
  
She took a deep breath, drinking deep of the acrid smoke, scorched wood, the chaos and fear in the air.  
  
The Nameless Queen stood silent and offered no succor, even as her sanctum burned around her.  
  
“Pity,” Ashe said, gazing up at the Queen.  
  
A Sister ran past, then ducked her head back into the corridor, robed in midnight blue.  
  
“Eldest!” She cried, with shaking hands. “The Church is on fire! There are people outside- what- what do we do?!”  
  
Ashe turned, her eyes- and her brand- burning with an infernal light. Ghostly antlers appeared at her temples, framing her face. She lifted her hands, wrists haloed by wreaths of flame. Behind her, the carved idol of the Nameless Queen smoked and began to burn.  
  
“Pray with me, Sister,” Ashe said, eyes wild, her wicked smile flashing in the firelight.  
  
_“All hail the Horned King.”_  
  
As fire and terror flooded the compound in equal measure, Flint’s mob formed a perimeter outside, eerily silent and still despite the chaos around them. They were silhouetted against the flames, specters in the firelight. They basked in the blaze, eyes forward, staring blankly into the light.  
  
“We’re live at the Church of the Nameless Queen, where a crowd has gathered and a massive fire has broken out-”  
  
The soot-faced reporter cried out as Flint threw them back against the side of their news van, ripping the microphone from her hands.  
  
“Keep filming!” He barked. Her cameraman nodded meekly and obeyed.  
  
Flint adjusted his collar.  
  
“Now that we have your attention,” Flint began, smiling for the camera, “This is a message for all of Halcyon City, on behalf of the Firepact. We are searching for a woman- a woman who has done us wrong. Wherever she is in this city, wherever she’s gone to ground, whoever’s roof she’s hiding behind… we _will_ find her. We _will_ have her, even if we have to burn down-”  
  
“I’m here.”  
  
Glory stalked down the street. David and Marta trailed at her heels, gazing up at the blazing compound in blank-faced horror.  
  
“I’m right here,” Glory hissed, in a voice like ice.  
  
Flint grinned, clapping his stolen microphone to the reporter’s chest and shoving her away.  
  
“The rebel,” Flint smiled, eyes flitting from Glory to Marta. “And the runaway. Two traitors for the price of one. Gentlemen!”  
  
As one, Flint’s thralls broke from their lines and charged forward, eyes filled with an unearthly fire. Glory opened her hands and extended her claws in a flash of silver- but Marta was at her side in an instant.  
  
A plume of water exploded up from the curb, shards of scrap metal studding the street. It coiled in the air and smashed the encroaching mob away, hurtling them to the curb in a massive spray, before redirecting itself towards the church. The wave blasted away the flames littering the front lawn and cleared a path inside.  
  
An arcane glyph hung in the air, and began to fade.  
  
“Marta!” Glory cried, but she was already running.  
  
David appeared at Glory’s shoulder, his pistol drawn. Three of Flint’s thralls hurled themselves wordlessly in front of their master. David’s stun rounds left them twitching and convulsing on the street.  
  
Flint smiled smugly and waved a hand, sending forward his thralls in a surge of bodies.  
  
“Get back here, asshole!” David snapped.  
  
“I’ve got him,” Glory said. “Go with her!”  
  
David nodded. He ran into the compound, his rifle dropping down into his arms.  
  
Glory watched him go for just a moment, and then Flint’s thralls were upon her.  
  
~*~  
  
Chaos had taken the church. A Sister cowered, trapped behind a pile of flaming rubble. She knelt and clutched the icon of Venus around her neck, the sign of the Nameless Queen. The roaring fire around her could not block out the screams of panic and pain that shuddered through the compound.  
  
There was a creak of wood and part of the ceiling collapsed, crashing down in a cloud of embers and soot-blackened plaster. The Sister cringed, clutching her icon and praying…  
  
And then, providence, for at that moment a plume of magicked water slammed into the pile of rubble and swept it down the hall, clearing the blocked doorway. The Sister blinked as her rescuer appeared, a shadow in the smoke.  
  
“Sister Magdalene?”  
  
Marta stepped forward, plumes of magicked water trailing from her back like mighty wings.  
  
“Sister Shelley,” Marta said, helping the older woman to her feet. “Are you alright?”  
  
“I am now,” Shelley nodded. “Dear, I never knew you were a Mage!”  
  
“This isn’t really the time,” Marta smiled. “Go on. I cleared the way out through the front.”  
  
“Bless you, dear,” Shelley said, clasping Marta’s hand in thanks. “Be careful. I saw the Eldest inside- but she’s… dear, she’s not herself.”  
  
Marta blinked.  
  
“What do you mean?”  
  
“Dear, Sister Ashe led this attack on our church,” Shelley said, somber. “Honestly, it’s as if she’s… _possessed_.”  
  
~*~  
  
Marta didn’t need to go far to see what Shelley meant by that. Stepping into the nave of the church was like stepping into Hell itself. Splintered wood and crumbling plaster fell from the ceiling in burning clumps, and fire was spreading through the pews, as if the flame itself was sitting in attendance, waiting to worship the one at the altar.  
  
Sister Ashe stood at the altar, looking for all the world like service was about to begin.  
  
Flames consumed the carved idol of the Nameless Queen, transforming her stone pedestal into a throne of flame. Sister Ashe paced the stone dais, her fluttering white robes untouched by soot or flame, shining a brilliant, resplendent white in the firelight. She raised her arms in exultation, standing before the statue as it became a bonfire.  
  
_“And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and the blood of the martyrs,”_ Ashe recited. _“And when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration.”_  
  
Ashe turned, and Marta saw the brand shining on her neck, and the ghastly fire in her hands. She saw the flame at her fingertips, in her hair, and in the pair of antlers rising from her head like a crown.  
  
It was a power both wretched and painfully, intimately familiar.  
  
“Welcome back, Sister Magdalene,” Ashe said, her voice echoed by the buzzing of insects and crackling flames. “Shall we pray, together?”  
  
Marta stared at the woman who first brought her into the church, who had her kneel before the Nameless Queen for benediction and guidance, who led her to the life of charity and piety that helped her break free from Harrow’s poisonous conditioning. To think, after all that…  
  
The blistering heat of the room pressed in around her. The curtain of magicked water, draped across Marta like a cloak, kept the fire at bay- but only just.  
  
Part of her, deep down, knew that she should have ran. Only the brave or foolish ran into burning buildings, rather than out of them. And right now, in this moment, Marta didn’t feel brave at all.  
  
Fear rooted her in place. Fear, and a stubborn will.  
  
She had to know.  
  
“Eldest,” Marta said, her voice almost lost to the roaring flame. “Why?”  
  
_“‘Why?’”_ Ashe gasped, incredulous, mocking. “The short answer, is because we needed to smoke your friend the traitor out from whatever bolt hole she’d run off to. The long answer: because there are two kinds of people in this world, people who do as they please, and people who can only do as they’re told. You need power to choose, and not just obey- and The Horned King is generous with his power. But do you want to know the really, really short answer?”  
  
Ashe splayed her fingers and she rose into the air, the folds of her gown billowing like wings. An arcane sigil drew itself in the air behind her, and the flames within the church gathered together, spiraling into a braid of coiled crimson magic. Ashe smiled a wicked smile, her voice thundering with purpose- with _power_.  
  
“ _I belong to the Pact. Until my soul sleeps, and my body burns._ ” Ashe cried. “ _NOW_ ** _BURN_** _!_ ”  
  
Marta clutched the icon around her neck, drew a sign in the air- and then Ashe’s pillar of fire came crashing down.  
  
~*~  
  
For the third time in 48 hours, Glory found herself being assaulted by a mob. The first time, they were mercenaries and street gangsters motivated by the promise of payment. The second time, they were the members of Father Servo’s ‘Communion’, being controlled remotely through their datajacks. Now, this third mob seemed to be enthralled by Flint’s voice alone.  
  
The power of the Brand, Glory supposed. The Horned King’s blessing.  
  
She was starting to see a pattern with his so-called ‘gifts’.  
  
She realized, in a flash of equal parts insight and irritation, that the Firepact knew she wasn’t unscrupulous enough to flick out her hand razors and carve a bloody path through what were, essentially, hostages. Through the swell of bodies, she could see Flint, his mouth open, doubtlessly in the middle of gloating about how he’d so brilliantly paralyzed Glory with her own conscience.  
  
Glory fixed her gaze on him, not hearing a word he was saying. At the base of her spine, her adrenal pump began to hum.  
  
She would count to three.  
  
Glory surged forward.  
  
_One._  
  
Claws out. Dodge the groping hands. Run. Jump.  
  
_Two._  
  
Stepping stones in the air. A knee. A shoulder. The side of a news van.  
  
_Three.  
  
_ Impact.  
  
Stick the landing.  
  
Flint staggered back. His fingers curled into hooks, reaching for the ragged line down his chest, splitting his brand in two.  
  
He tried to speak, only for blood to spray out of his mouth in a ghastly mist. Glory rose from where she’d landed in a crouch from her diving strike, tearing out Flint’s hamstrings in a single fluid swipe. Bloody, beaten, his suit in tatters, he was a far cry from the dignified Firepact Agent who’d attempted the hit on her only two nights ago.  
  
Glory grabbed him by his suit collar and dragged him across the church grounds, past groups of his thralls standing limp, puppets with their strings cut. His mouth was moving, though he couldn’t make a sound, only dribble wine-dark blood past his lips and down his chest.  
  
“Let me guess,” Glory said, as she pulled him in from the street and towards the compounds burning ruin. “You belong to the Pact, until your soul sleeps, and your body burns.”  
  
Glory threw him into the blaze.  
  
“You did better when you still had your drones,” Glory said flatly.  
  
Flint dragged himself along the ground, his chest wound scraping the grass, his hamstrung legs limp and useless behind him. He made it one agonizing step before his suit caught fire.  
  
Several gruesome minutes later, Flint’s thralls rose again, clutching their heads and coming back to their senses- but by then, Glory was long gone.  
  
~*~  
  
Fire cascaded down, smashing into the floor and erupting across the pews. When the wave finally parted, Marta was on her hands and knees, gasping for breath, with a glyph glowing faintly on the floor around her, and the remnants of an icy shield weeping steam into the air.  
  
Ashe loomed above her, borne aloft by an otherworldly power, her robe flaring out like wings. Her hair shone with the power of the Horned King, blazing fire-red. And, to Marta’s quiet shame, she could still feel the memory of that power, the echo, charging her own body and making the very tips of her hair glow like hot coals.  
  
“You remember, don’t you?” Ashe asked, eyes ablaze with light. “You were like me, once. You remember what it’s like to wield the power of a god.”  
  
Marta’s limbs were heavy. It took all she had just to look up.  
  
“No,” she rasped. “I’m not like you.”  
  
“Not now,” Ashe smiled. “But you could be, again. You’re a traitor, Magdalene. You forced me to burn down this compound, and cost me a perfectly good identity. But the Horned King rewards loyalty with power. His power can be yours again, if you only _let him in_.”  
  
“No,” Marta whispered.  
  
“You’ve no power to choose, girl!” Ashe snapped. “You can only obey!”  
  
Marta cried out in alarm as something took hold of her body, shivering and convulsing. She fought her rebel muscles, feeling her willpower buckle under the weight of something huge and unknowable. She felt the crushing presence, the weight pressing in from all sides, the oppressive heat of an inferno far worse than a mere burning building.  
  
Mage instinct took over. She channeled her willpower, raising her mental wards- but it wasn’t enough. How could it be enough? Trying to hold back the daemon was like holding a door against a flood with only your bare hands. The nightmare was coming. He was already here…  
  
**_Let me in._**  
  
The presence was suffocating. Intoxicating. But the poisonous desire, the echoes of addiction, would not let her go. Marta screwed her eyes shut, blinking away tears, the ends of her hair shining red…  
  
_Glory…!_ _  
_  
A phantom flicked across her vision- a robed woman, outlined in arcane blue. The oppressive presence drew back for a moment, and Marta sucked in a desperate breath, clutching the icon of Venus, so like an ankh, around her neck.  
  
“Hecate,” Marta breathed, like a prayer, as the goddess faded from her eyes.  
  
Above her, Ashe’s face twisted into scorn.  
  
“Your matron bars the doors,” Ashe spat, “when she should be preparing to receive her King. All goddesses are one within the Nameless Queen, and the goddesses are one within me! I bless their names, the wives of the Horned King! I am Lilith, consort of daemons, turned away from Eden merely for declaring herself man’s equal! I am the Whore of Babylon, astride a scarlet beast with seven heads and ten horns, a herald of the end! I am the Red Apostle, the Horned King’s right hand! I am Jezebel, Queen of-”  
  
A gunshot cut short Ashe’s manic ranting. It struck a shimmering barrier around Ashe with the sound of chipped glass.  
  
“You know Jezebel died, right?” David asked. “Way I remember it, she was thrown out a window.”  
  
David emptied his rifle into Ashe with one long pull of the trigger. The barrage crashed against her barrier like hail on a tin roof. There was a sound of shattering glass- both of Ashe’s barrier breaking and the window smashing behind her- and Ashe hurtled out of the church, wreathed in fire and stained glass.  
  
David slid a fresh magazine into his rifle and slung it over his shoulder. He knelt by Marta’s side. Within her magic circle, her little place of protection, the air was still cool and speckled with mist- but outside that bubble, the church was collapsing.  
  
“Come on,” David pleaded, helping Marta to her feet.  
  
“Where’s-”  
  
“She’s fine,” David smiled. “She should be right behind-”  
  
“Here,” Glory said, making David jump out of his skin. “I’m right here.”  
  
“Glory…” Marta sniffled, before darting forward and wrapping her in a hug. Glory stiffened, awkwardly patting Marta on the back- which, given her hand razors, seemed more threat than comfort.  
  
“Miss me?” Glory teased.  
  
David smiled, despite everything. It was about the warmest he’d ever seen Glory act.  
  
Then a wooden beam fell from the rafters and smashed into the burning pews, ruining it.  
  
“Building’s coming down,” Glory said, letting Marta lean on her shoulder. “Time to go.”  
  
“Got it,” David replied.  
  
There was an explosion behind them. They whirled around, David’s rifle dropping into his hands and bracing against this shoulder, Glory’s revolver snapping up to aim.  
  
Ashe rose from the debris, haloed in fire, the numerous bloody holes in her torso lit from within by a wretched light. She was burning from the inside out, her mouth and eyes weeping flame, and when she spoke, her voice was echoed by a chorus of thousands.  
  
_“Until her soul sleeps, and her body burns…”_  
  
The Red Apostle threw her hands forward, a pillar of fire cannoning towards the trio. Glory threw Marta behind her and held up a hand, the Heart of Feuerstelle tracing her veins with green light. The blaze halted in its tracks, wavering before the ring of green flame. Then Glory extended her claws and slashed open the beam. It burst apart at her touch, scattering harmlessly around them in the wake of a spring breeze and the scent of honeysuckle.  
  
_“Headstrong little mouse!”_ The daemon roared, through Ashe’s mouth. **_“Let me in!”_**  
  
The presence shot forward in a plume of ghostly fire, abandoning the burned-out husk of Ashe’s body. Glory held Marta close. Their auras mingled- ocean blue and forest green, Hecate and the Heart warding away the daemon’s will- but just a few steps away…  
  
David cried out. His body went rigid, his limbs fighting his brain for control. Flames flickered around his head, his eyes.  
  
“Let him go!” Marta cried.  
  
“Wait,” Glory said, drawing forward.  
  
David’s hands lurched for his rifle and fired off a burst, the rounds sparking off of Glory’s augmetic shoulder. David grit his teeth. He pulled the strap off his shoulder and hurled his rifle away before he could squeeze off another shot. Then, when his hand lurched to his holster and drew his pistol, he forced his thumb up and clicked the release. The magazine of ammunition clattered to the floor, and his pistol with it.  
  
David gasped, a crown of fire sliding over his mind’s eye. Flames began to gather in his outstretched hands.  
  
_Foolish boy. Do you think I need the tools of man to do my killing?_ _  
__  
_ David cried out and threw his hands forward-  
  
-and the plume of fire he summoned sputtered and faded before Glory and Marta were even singed.  
  
“Sorry to disappoint you,” Glory said, staring down the daemon wearing David’s skin. “But David isn’t a very powerful Mage.”  
  
The daemon roared in frustration, charging forward, no doubt with the intent to kill Glory and Marta with his bare hands. Marta cringed. Glory ducked.  
  
She fell to one knee, scooping David’s pistol up off the ground.  
  
Even with the magazine ejected, he still had one round in the pipe.  
  
David was right on top of her. Glory jabbed the gun into his chest, stared down the phantom in his eyes.  
  
“Tell your boss I’m coming for him.”  
  
Glory fired.  
  
The stun round spattered into David’s chest and filled him with a surge of electricity, shocking him out of consciousness- and forcing the daemon out.  
  
The fragment of the Horned King fled David’s body, shrieking in pain and frustration. It passed over the church like a strong wind, the flames consuming the compound flaring upwards, resonating with its impotent fury. The fire rose, one last act of spite before the banished spirit dissipated on the wind.  
  
Glory cradled David’s limp body in her arms, heedless of the electricity crackling along his limbs. The building’s wooden frame was creaking ominously, and the compound was blazing out of control.  
  
Glory felt a hand on her shoulder. She looked up, and met Marta’s eyes.  
  
Marta opened her arms.  
  
A glyph of etched blue light formed a circle beneath their feet.  
  
The Church of the Nameless Queen’s burning husk crashed down on their heads.  
  
~*~  
  
Hours passed.  
  
Sister Shelley watched, with a grim fascination, as the Church of the Nameless Queen burned to the ground. There was no relief. Who would come? Out in the sprawl, far from the corporate holdings in the center of the city…  
  
There was no danger of the fire spreading beyond the compound, so that was a small mercy, at least. But with no risk of it endangering corporate property, the fire would burn until nature willed it.  
  
Imagine Shelley’s surprise, then, when it began to rain.  
  
Sister Shelley stood under the awning of a makeshift tent, while her fellow Sisters tended injuries- many of them their own. The rain came down around them, smothering the blaze, leaving only a huge plume of gray smoke hanging over the block like a grave.  
  
It was an apt, if macabre, comparison. How many people had died in that blaze?  
  
Too many. Far too many.  
  
Shelley clutched the icon of Venus around her neck, praying for one soul in particular…  
  
And then she saw it- a dome, a bubble of blue light at the heart of the ruined church, and the trio emerging from the smoke.  
  
Shelley smiled, her heart swelling in her chest.  
  
“Providence,” she whispered, the icon of Venus shimmering in her hands.  
  
~*~  
  
Glory and Marta sat under a makeshift tent on the street, watching the rain wash away the catastrophe they brought upon the Church of the Nameless Queen. David had regained consciousness while they were waiting out the blaze. He lingered nearby, chatting with Sister Shelley, giving the two women their space.  
  
“This is a nightmare,” Marta murmured, staring up at the rising smoke. “And I brought it here.”  
  
“ _We_ brought it here,” Glory said. “And, well. You got us out of there, too.”  
  
Marta shrugged.  
  
“You and David did all the work, really,” Marta muttered glumly. “When I fought Sister Ashe, I… I barely even did anything.”  
  
“You survived,” Glory said. “That’s not nothing.”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
Marta exhaled. Slowly, she curled a pinky around Glory’s. Glory’s machined metal hands were cool to the touch.  
  
“He was here,” Marta murmured. “The Horned King. Or part of him, at least.”  
  
Glory stayed silent, staring out into the rain.  
  
“You’re still going to hunt him?” Marta asked. “You’re still going to go after Harrow?”  
  
“Yes,” Glory said. “Do you still want to come with us?”  
  
Marta’s heart caught in her chest.  
  
‘...Yes,” she breathed.  
  
Glory turned, and their eyes met.  
  
“Good,” Glory said simply.  
  
“Good,” Marta smiled.  
  
David wandered back to rejoin them, heaving a sigh.  
  
“This place is gonna need one hell of a remodel,” he muttered. “I mean, I know it was just a building. But a roof means a lot to people who don’t have one.”  
  
“The Sisters will rebuild,” Marta said, with a quiet conviction. “The Queen will provide.”  
  
“I hope the Queen won’t mind taking donations,” David shrugged. “Now that Sister Ashe is… indisposed, Sister Shelley is taking over as Eldest. That means she’ll be overseeing the fundraising and the reconstruction.”  
  
“How does she feel about that?” Marta asked.  
  
“She said she’d rather just be running the kitchen again,” David said.  
  
“That sounds like her.”  
  
“Mr. Wen,” Glory cut in. “If all our affairs are in order, I think it’s time we got moving.”  
  
David glanced at Marta, and gave her a small, tired smile.  
  
“Got it,” David said. “I’ll go get the car.”  
  
“Where do we go from here?” Marta asked.  
  
Glory paused. She reached into her coat and withdrew the Rose Compass, glinting in the dim, pre-dawn light. She tossed it to Marta, who caught it in both hands, studying the engraved symbol that could have been a rose and could have been a flame.  
  
“What does it say?” Glory asked.  
  
Marta opened the Compass and studied it. David tensed.  
  
Marta turned, aligning the compass. Behind her, the rain clouds were cut through with silver, the first threads of light cast by the rising sun.  
  
The Rose Compass’s third, red needle wavered, for just a moment, before settling in place.  
  
“West,” Marta said. “It says west.”  
  
Glory let out the breath she was holding. She smiled. Nodded.  
  
“Then let’s get going.”  
  
The tension between them dissipated, like smoke cut through with rain. Glory took a seat in the back of David’s car, joined by Marta after a moment’s hesitation. David got into the driver’s seat and pulled his door closed. He reached up, catching Glory’s eyes in the mirror.  
  
“You shot me,” he said, playfully indignant.  
  
“I knew you could take it,” Glory replied.  
  
“You owe me a new shirt,” David said.  
  
“Get a new one after you get paid,” Glory said.  
  
“He gets paid?” Marta chimed in. “Do _I_ get paid?”  
  
“You _volunteered_ ,” Glory teased.  
  
“Aww!”  
  
The trio laughed- and, gods, how long had it been since Glory just _laughed_? It was a moment of levity and light that she sorely needed after her relentless last few days. They ventured out into the dark, with rain clouds overhead and the smoking ruin of the compound behind them, three lights in the shadows- the forest green glow of the Heart of Feuerstelle, flanked by Marta and David- Glory’s left and right hands.  
  
~*~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At long last, the gang's all here! Now our road trip can begin in earnest. Glory and Marta's reunion was off to a somewhat rocky start, but, well, nothing rekindles a relationship better than facing mortal peril together, right? (Maybe not.)
> 
> At any rate, I hope you all enjoyed the read, and I hope you'll stay tuned for Chapter Four: Eyes in the Dark.


	4. Eyes in the Dark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Glory, Marta, and David have had a long week. As they head out onto the road and put Halcyon City behind them, the trio takes a moment a breathe, rest, and (re)discover each other- three wandering souls, out in the wild.

~*~  
  
_Marta dreams._ _  
__  
__She is sitting on a cliff, gazing out at the sea. Her legs dangle over the ledge and she kicks them, like a child. Her mother is with her, a smudged blur in her peripheral vision, robed in midnight blue- a memory from too long ago, coalescing from fog._ _  
__  
__She stands, and finds herself in a copse of trees- smoothly, seamlessly, as is the flow of dreams._ _  
__  
__There is a man sitting cross-legged on the grass before her. His head is a stag’s skull, crowned with antlers, lit from within by a gentle sapphire light. Vines spill out the back of his skull and lie draped across his shoulders, his arms, in a semblance of long hair._ _  
__  
__He smells like the land; of honeysuckle and tilled soil._ _  
__  
__Thunder rumbles in the distance. Marta lifts her head, sees the glint of red and gold, tastes the tang of smoke in the air._ _  
__  
_**_He is coming._** _  
__  
__The stag-headed man fixes Marta with his empty gaze, blue fire in an antlered skull. His voice comes out like gravel, like crumbling stone._ _  
__  
_**_Do not let him in._** _  
_  
~*~  
  
Marta woke with a soft gasp, her cheek resting on smooth fabric. She instinctively nuzzled the cloth before she caught a flash of black and red and remembered where she was. She snapped awake, jerking back and banging her head on the low ceiling of David’s sedan. She mewled in pain, the beginnings of a blush coloring her cheeks.  
  
“I am… so… sorry,” Marta eked out, wincing.  
  
Glory stared at her, her dark eyes rimmed with red. Unnerving as Glory’s piercing, unblinking gaze was, there was a hint of mirth buried beneath the ice. Glory’s smiles rarely made it all the way to her lips, but they always started in her eyes.  
  
“It’s okay,” Glory said. “How did you sleep?”  
  
“Okay,” Marta shrugged. “Weird dreams. You?”  
  
“I didn’t sleep,” Glory said flatly. “And I don’t dream.”  
  
“Oh.”  
  
Marta looked past Glory and out her window. They were at a fueling station, framed by trees, fog, and a cloudy sky, with the dim yellow lights of a mini-mart only barely cutting through the gloom.  
  
“Come on,” Glory said, tipping her head towards the window. “I was just going to ask if you wanted anything.”  
  
~*~  
  
“Good lord, David, you’re still driving that hunk of junk? It’s so old it still runs on gas.”  
  
“Yeah, and you still sell it, so what does that say about you?”  
  
The shopkeeper grinned. He was an older man, in a denim vest over a white T-shirt, with a gray beard and a trucker’s cap. Steve Wilk, owner of Wilk’s Fuel Station and Auto Shop (and Mini-Mart), the last little island of civilization before trees and fog took over.  
  
“You going on some kinda trip?” Wilk asked, amused, as he scanned and bagged a veritable mountain of protein bars, energy drinks, string cheese and soy jerky.  
  
“It’s for a job,” David explained, a growing number of shopping bags hanging from his arms. “I’m going to be out of the city for awhile.”  
  
Glory appeared, silent and inscrutable. She dropped another pile of goods on the counter just as Wilk had finished bagging the first- aspirin, rolls of gauze, bottles of quick-sealing trauma spray. Marta followed behind, adding a number of boxes to the pile- tampons, teabags, chemical hand warmers. She glanced up at David.  
  
“...I get cold,” Marta said, sheepish.  
  
David reached into the pile and picked up a bottle of trauma spray.  
  
“‘For the instant sealing of open wounds’,” David read. “‘Like stitches in a bottle.’ ...Y’know, don’t all three of us have some form of healing magic?”  
  
“Say you’ve just received a traumatic, painful, bloody wound,” Glory said, tone flat as always. “What would be easier: concentrating on a healing spell, or shaking a spray can and pressing a button?”  
  
“Point,” David admitted.  
  
Wilk stared at the trio. “Just what kind of trouble do y’all think you’re gonna run into?”  
  
“Bears,” Glory said, deadpan. She took an armful of shopping bags and left, Marta following close behind. Wilk watched them go, shaking his head.  
  
“There’s an interesting girl,” Wilk muttered.  
  
“She’s my boss,” David cut in. “And she’s paying for all this, so-”  
  
“Easy, boy. Meant no offense.”  
  
David mumbled a non-response, handing over his credstick. Wilk scanned it and handed it back, along with the rest of the crew’s supplies.  
  
“Did you hear about the fire?” Wilk asked.  
  
David hesitated.  
  
“Which one?”  
  
“South side. Took out a church, a homeless shelter…”  
  
David’s expression darkened. “Yeah. That was a shame.”  
  
“There was another one, up at the docks. Some chemical fire. But this one, they’re saying, this one was the gangs. Bunch of thugs bombed the place. Can you believe that?”  
  
Shadows flashed across David’s eyelids. The Branded. The mob. The sorceress. The fight in a burning church. The daemon seizing his skin, fighting him for control.  
  
David sucked in a breath.  
  
“I really can’t,” he muttered.  
  
“Nasty. Nasty stuff. It’s shit like this that makes me want to get out of this city, myself.” Wilk smiled. “...Can’t, though.”  
  
“Why’s that?”  
  
“Come on, kid. _I_ can’t skip town. I gotta wait for everyone else to do it, so I can fuel ‘em up on their way out. You think I’d miss out on all that business? I’d make a fortune.”  
  
David chuckled. Grinned.  
  
“It was nice seeing you, Mr. Wilk. I gotta go. Say hi to the dogs for me, would you?”  
  
“When was the last time you saw ‘em, huh? They’re gettin’ big. Real big. They’ve been dying to see you again.”  
  
Mr. Wilk reached out and gave David’s hand a firm shake.  
  
“You take care on your little road trip, son.”  
  
“Thanks, Mr. Wilk.”  
  
“Oh, and David?” Wilk called, with David halfway out the door. “The next time you want to buy me out of jerky and string cheese, you call ahead, first!”  
  
~*~  
  
Scarcely an hour out of Halcyon City, and already the urban sprawl gives way to one-lane roads, thick woods and log cabins. The sky remained gray and gloomy, and fog seemed to follow them wherever they went. It was as if the Nameless Queen’s ghost had risen from the burning ruin of her church, and had come to haunt their steps.  
  
Everywhere they looked, it was gray, gray, gray. It was gray in the misted woods closing in around them, and it was just as gray in the shifting shadows of astral space, where David now lurked.  
  
In astral space, the light of life blazes like stars. But as David scanned the lodge, he saw only the faintest traces of memory, echoes of its previous inhabitants, glimmering like moonlight through the trees.  
  
David blinked, and the faint glow of astral space receded back into the darkness of reality. He eased open the door, pistol drawn. He crouched in the shadows, reaching up to key in his comm.  
  
“All clear,” he whispered.  
  
The lights came on, and David practically jumped out of his skin- only to feel Glory’s hands on his shoulders in an act of questionable reassurance.  
  
“You’re okay,” Glory said tonelessly. Marta stood behind, smiling sheepishly beside the light switch.  
  
David exhaled, holstering his pistol.  
  
This lodge wasn’t quite like the one David was working at four days ago, when Glory charged in, killed all his coworkers, and only spared him because, he was forced to assume, he asked nicely. That lodge had two storeys, couches, and bedrooms on the second floor. This place, meanwhile, could charitably be called a lodge, when in reality it was more of a ‘shack’.  
  
That being said, it was still roomier than David’s car, so nobody was really complaining.  
  
“Nice place,” Marta said, glancing up at the lumen strips incongruously set into the walls. “Electric lighting kinda ruins the look, but- Oh! A fireplace!”  
  
“Let’s start a fire, then,” Glory said. “I don’t want anyone coming by and wondering why the lights are on in the middle of spring, with hunting season months away. Do we have any firewood?”  
  
David poked his head out the back door. “Hopper’s empty.”  
  
“I’ll go find some, then,” Glory said.  
  
“Do you have a hatchet?” Marta asked.  
  
Glory extended her hand razors with a click of metal.  
  
“I’ll manage.”  
  
She waggled her clawed fingers at Marta, a playful smile in her eyes, before stepping out.  
  
“Keeping the lights off is one thing,” David said, “but what about the car?”  
  
“I can take care of that,” Marta offered. “Come on. I’ll show you something cool.”  
  
Outside, David shut the trunk with a thud, slinging his rifle over his shoulder and stepping back.  
  
“Okay,” Marta said, cracking her fingers. “Watch this.”  
  
David watched, fascinated, as the tips of Marta’s hair began to shine like hot coals. Traceries of blue light flowed down her arms and gathered at her fingertips in a coruscating cloud of energy. Marta blew a kiss across her palm. The spell dusted across her hands and coiled around the car like wisps of smoke.  
  
David’s vision shifted and blurred, like heat haze, and just like that, his car had vanished.  
  
David reached out, groping for his car in the seemingly empty air. He could feel it beneath his touch, and could hear himself tapping on the roof. He blinked and slipped into astral space. There he could see it, tinged with the lingering traces of their auras- Marta’s in blue, David’s own in gold, with a shadow where Glory’s should have been- but to his eyes in realspace, his car was as good as gone.  
  
David whistled, impressed.  
  
“Whoa,” he breathed. Marta beamed.  
  
“It’s- It’s, y’know, not perfect. The illusion only works if it’s not moving, so no taking it with us on the go. We can run _or_ hide, not both.”  
  
“Still. That’s a hell of a trick,” David said. He looked up at Marta, suddenly sheepish.  
  
“But, uh. You _can_ make it visible again, right? All our food’s still in the trunk, and uh… I can’t see where to put the key.”  
  
~*~  
  
Glory returned from her firewood-hunt soon after with an apology and an armful of moist wood. (“It rained last night, remember?”) Fortunately, Marta then used her magic to draw the water out of the wood, making them properly dry and oh-so-flammable, and a spark from Glory snapping her mechanical fingers took care of the rest.  
  
Their little fire crackled in the hearth, borrowed, like so many other things- shelter, stillness, time. Who knew how long this safety would last? But despite everything, a moment of calm managed to settle over the trio- a trio who met under decidedly un-calm circumstances.  
  
Marta took a deep breath and sighed, savoring the moment’s peace. The three of them were assembled on the floor around a collapsible cot they were all using as a table in the sparsely furnished lodge. To her left was David, gnawing on a piece of soy jerky. He was fiddling with his PDA, putting together a playlist to sync to his comm. Marta could hear the first few muffled seconds of each track as he considered it; plaintive strings, melancholy piano, blaring synth and everything in between. To her right was Glory, also studying her PDA, her eyes fixed in her characteristic intense, unblinking stare. Glory wasn’t too close, but neither was she too far away.  
  
Marta was between them, facing the fireplace. She sat in the shifting firelight, their little borrowed hearth so unlike the blaze that had consumed her church. Scarcely a day ago, she’d been a nun, living a life of charity and piety in the service of the Nameless Queen. Now, look at her. She’d fought daemons and sorceresses, pulled people out of burning buildings… She’d stepped out of her life of quiet devotion for all of 24 hours, and now here she was, on the run, with friends old and new, both of whom had already saved her life at least once before.  
  
How much difference a day makes.  
  
Unlike David and Glory, Marta wasn’t looking at her PDA. She was shuffling her deck of Tarot cards, handmade and hand-painted. They had been a gift from Sister Shelley, long ago, when she’d first joined the abbey.  
  
‘They’ll tell your fortune’, Shelley’d told her, ‘and if you don’t care for what they tell you, you can just use them like regular playing cards.’  
  
Honestly, Marta wasn’t really looking at her cards, either. She was just shuffling them so she had something to do with her hands. It was Glory who really held her attention.  
  
Glory, who sacrificed herself, body and soul, to break free of Harrow and The Horned King. Glory, who literally carries the weight of that sacrifice everywhere she goes.  
  
Glory, who, even after escaping The Horned King’s grasp, dove right back into Hell to pull Marta and the other kids out.  
  
Glory, who, years ago, caught first Marta’s eyes, then her heart.  
  
Glory, who, even now, clung to Marta’s thoughts and wouldn’t let go.  
  
“Marta?”  
  
“Huh? What?” Marta blinked.  
  
“You’re staring,” Glory said, peering over the top of her PDA. “Do I have something on my face?”  
  
Glory’s eyes glinted in the firelight. Marta sucked in a breath.  
  
“Um. Yes, actually. D’you mind if I…?”  
  
Glory nodded her assent, leaning closer. Marta reached out with a tissue and dabbed at a few rust-red flecks on Glory’s cheek. In the firelight, one could almost believe they were freckles.  
  
Marta pulled away, trying not to dwell on how warm Glory had been beneath her hand.  
  
“Blood,” she said, simply.  
  
“Don’t worry,” Glory said. “It usually isn’t mine.”  
  
“Usually,” Marta echoed, watching the shadows flicker across Glory’s face.  
  
“Thanks,” Glory said lightly, returning to her work, while Marta gathered the willpower to finally wrench her gaze away.  
  
Marta fixed her eyes forward, embarrassed and annoyed at her own feelings.  
  
It had been years since she and Glory had been together. Even then, it was as part of Harrow’s Apostles, his inner circle of wives and, frankly, accomplices. They were just teenagers, then. Just kids. Marta could barely remember it all, through the intoxicating haze of The Horned King’s influence.  
  
Then Glory snapped. The Horned King pushed her too far- deceived her into killing her own mother. That moment of grief yanked her out of the fog, and she disappeared. She got the surgery that gutted her magical potential and cut her off from The Horned King, and vanished into the shadows, beyond Harrow’s reach.  
  
Then she came back, years later. She rescued Marta, rescued Harrow’s acolytes, and purified the Heart of Feuerstelle, the fragment of The Horned King that Harrow was using to force their obedience when words alone were no longer enough.  
  
Their reunion was short-lived. Marta left to rediscover herself, now that she was cut free from Harrow’s poisonous influence. And she promised she’d get back in touch once she’d figured things out again.  
  
Well, here she was, and Marta did not, in fact, have everything figured out. She didn’t have all the answers. But she sure kept the feelings- even after all this time, it was like riding a bike. You never really forget.  
  
Marta heaved a weary sigh, fanning her cards out on the cot. She blew a strand of hair out of her eyes and drew a card, holding it up to the firelight.  
  
A woman, robed in blue, seated between two pillars- the darkness and the light- with a banner or veil stretched behind her, separating the conscious from the unconscious.  
  
The High Priestess. Patience. Insight. Intuition. The unknown.  
  
Marta made a face.  
  
“You think that’s funny?” Marta muttered, and shuffled it back into the deck.  
  
~*~  
  
_Marta dreams._ _  
__  
__She half-expects to see someone berating her for still carrying a torch for Glory. Maybe she’d be on a stage, under a spotlight, in front of a leering, laughing crowd. Maybe there’d be someone looming above her, mocking her. Maybe it’d be her parents. Or Harrow. Maybe even The Horned King himself._ _  
__  
__Marta doesn’t dream of any of these things. Instead, she is back in the Wood._ _  
__  
__The Heart of Feuerstelle sits before her, his antlered skull of a head lit from within by a tranquil blue light. He sits, serene, even as fires burn in the distance._ _  
__  
__Smoke drifts into Marta’s face and stings her eyes. One by one, torches appear in the clearing- rising up out of the ground in an eerie imitation of trees taking root._ _  
__  
_**_Six._** _  
__  
__The Heart’s voice rumbles through Marta’s head like a tremor in the earth._ _  
__  
_**_Six jewels in the crown of the Horned King._** _  
__  
__Six torches ring the clearing, but only four are ablaze. Two of them stand unlit, weeping black smoke into the air._ _  
__  
__The Heart leans forward. He sighs. Smiles, if a skull could be said to smile. A cool breeze passes over Marta, ruffling her hair and whistling through the trees, smelling of honeysuckle and tilled earth. The Heart speaks, his voice like thunder._ _  
__  
_**_You’re almost halfway there._** _  
_  
~*~  
  
Daylight came- technically, if not literally. The weather stayed gloomy as ever, with clouds overhead and fog blanketing the road. The loamy earth and sweet honeysuckle of Marta’s dream gave way to wooden floorboards, charcoal, and a sizzling skillet.  
  
“I’m sorry about this, boss,” she heard David saying. “I’m, uh, not really a _cook_.”  
  
“That’s fine. These aren’t really ingredients.”  
  
“That’s the last time I go grocery shopping at a gas station,” David muttered. “But I meant more along the lines of, ‘this is my first time cooking in a fireplace’.”  
  
Marta blinked herself awake, her vision settling into place. She pushed off of her bedroll, sitting up. David was kneeling by the fireplace, Glory sitting nearby. He had propped a grate over the coals, and was tending to a small pan, the smoke making his eyes water.  
  
“I feel like I’m doing this wrong,” David grumbled. “I’m getting smoke all up in my face.”  
  
“Is there anything I can do to help?” Glory offered.  
  
“Yeah, actually. Would you mind chopping up some potatoes?”  
  
“Alright. Do you have a knife?”  
  
“Just use your claw-thingies.”  
  
“You want me to use my hand razors? Do you have any idea where those have been?”  
  
Glory turned, and caught Marta’s gaze. She smiled at her- figuratively, as Glory’s smiles so rarely made it to her mouth- and in the dim morning light her eyes glinted like lit coals.  
  
“Good morning,” Glory murmured, the warmth in her voice pricking Marta’s heart like a fishhook.  
  
“G- Good morning,” Marta returned. The flush across her cheeks was twofold; first, from the blissful thought of simply waking up to Glory, and second, from the embarrassment of such a little thing getting her so flustered.  
  
Glory held Marta’s gaze for a long moment. Their eyes glinted in the firelight, brown and amber edged with red, the mark of the Horned King’s influence lingering on them both. Marta swallowed. Even before the surgery, Glory had a habit of staring right through her...  
  
“Mornin’,” David chimed in, oblivious, and Marta exhaled, quietly grateful.  
  
“Good morning, David,” Marta smiled. She lifted her pendant, the icon of Venus, and slipped it around her neck. “What are we having?”  
  
“Breakfast! ...Sort of!” David announced, with something almost, but not quite, resembling pride. “We’ve got eggs, sort of, and uh, sausage, sort of. And potatoes. Those are real. I’m like… ninety percent sure.”  
  
“I don’t know if I like those odds,” Marta teased.  
  
David made a face. He held out the skillet and Glory dropped in a handful of chopped potatoes, hissing as they hit the pan.  
  
“Come on,” David protested. “Doesn’t that just smell delicious?”  
  
“Well. I mean...”  
  
“It certainly smells.”  
  
“ _Thank you_ , Glory. That’s… that’s _real_ helpful.”  
  
~*~  
  
For all their needling, in the end, David really could make a halfway decent batch of skillet potatoes. Although, next time, he’d prop up the grate a little higher for better temperature control… and maybe put the potatoes in first, so they have time to get tender before the eggs start to burn. It was still miles better than soy jerky and string cheese, although, admittedly, that wasn’t a very high bar.  
  
Marta sat back and sighed, satisfyingly full. Glory and David were both poking at their PDAs; Glory, studying her screen and scribbling notes into a pocket notebook; David, his eyes darting quizzically between his PDA, the still-warm skillet on his lap, a spatula, and a little box of coarse salt.  
  
For one reason or another, Marta found herself smiling. It had been a hectic few days. To simply enjoy a meal with friends, old and new, felt comfortingly domestic and mundane.  
  
That is, until David snapped to attention. He jumped up and pressed his ear against the wall, the skillet falling off his lap and hitting the floor with a thud.  
  
“What-” Glory began.  
  
“Get down,” David hissed.  
  
Marta dropped flat, her pendant clanging against the floorboards. Glory followed suit. David crouched by the wall, his hand hovering over his thigh holster.  
  
Marta felt the rumbling along the ground. She exhaled, sliding into astral space. She saw Glory beside her, a shadow threaded with green, and David by the door, his aura glimmering gold, urgent, attentive.  
  
She saw them- a cluster of glowing red, ambling past like a meteor in slow motion. She felt the weight of their tires on the pavement, the rumble of engines. Marta exhaled, vision snapping back to reality.  
  
“Two vehicles,” David reported, peering out the window. “Red pickup, then a big white van. Probably driving slow ‘cuz of the fog. Gone now.”  
  
David exhaled, returning to his spot at the folding camp bed they were all using as a table.  
  
“Sorry, guys,” David said. “False alarm. Probably.”  
  
“Better safe,” Glory shrugged, returning to her notes.  
  
David glanced at Marta and Glory, looking up from his PDA’s extranet article on how to clean a cast iron skillet when you don’t have access to running water.  
  
“You know,” he began, shaking some coarse salt onto the pan and starting to scrape, “I’d meant to ask this earlier, before the, y’know, stuck-in-a-burning-building thing. But how did you two meet?”  
  
Marta and Glory shared a look.  
  
“It’s a long story,” Marta offered.  
  
“We’ve got time,” David said.  
  
“We met through Harrow,” Glory said. Her eyes were flinty and hard. “That’s all you need to know.”  
  
David withered under Glory’s stare. Eventually, Glory exhaled, tucking her PDA into a coat pocket and rising to her feet.  
  
“I’m taking a walk,” she announced icily, slipping out the back door.  
  
An uncomfortable quiet settled between them. Marta cleared her throat.  
  
“I’m sorry,” she said.  
  
“No, I’m sorry,” David muttered. He set the pan aside, half-finished. “It’s a touchy subject. I probably shouldn’t pry.”  
  
“That ‘touchy subject’ is the foundation of this whole trip,” Marta said.  
  
“I’m just a bodyguard,” David shrugged. “...Who, admittedly, just let his primary walk off into the woods without him. But still. Glory doesn’t have to answer my questions.”  
  
“No,” Marta pressed. “If you’re going to help Glory in this hunt- if you’re going to follow her into Hell- then you deserve to know exactly who you’re after and what you’re getting into.”  
  
David considered that. Swallowed. Nodded.  
  
“Alright,” he said. “Fair enough. So… how _did_ you two meet?”  
  
Marta let out a long, tired sigh.  
  
“It feels like a lifetime ago…”  
  
~*~  
  
Marta told David everything. Haltingly at first, then all at once, like a handful of misplaced pebbles triggering a landslide. How she first joined the cult as a teenager, sucked in by Harrow’s looks, his charm, his bright lure of freedom, the promise of independence from an unjust, uncaring society. How he put her to work, combing the streets for kids who’d be open to what Harrow had to say- and how, over time, they’d hang on to his every word.  
  
She told him about how they touched up an abandoned hunting lodge in the Schonbuch Forest and transformed it into Der Feuerstelle, The Fireplace, Harrow’s compound and castle. She told him about what she became: a face of the cult, recruiter, kidnapper, a den mother to the acolytes, a wife to Harrow himself. Harrow made her dye her hair fire-red, as a symbol of her status. She was favored among the cult; Harrow’s queen and right hand.  
  
All this time, Harrow hadn’t resorted to using dark magic to control his followers. He lured them and kept them, with words alone.  
  
Harrow’s poisonous charisma was enough to utterly consume Marta’s thoughts. She was obsessed. Poisoned by his words. Addicted to his body.  
  
And then, on a routine scouting sweep for potential recruits, Marta found Glory.  
  
Glory was homeless. Penniless. Young. Vulnerable.  
  
Beautiful. That’s what Marta thought. She couldn’t let someone so beautiful simply starve on the street.  
  
So Marta reached out her hand… and Der Feuerstelle swallowed Glory up.  
  
Over time, the influence of The Horned King began to grow. Little changes piled up over time, little things that went unnoticed in the haze of Harrow’s worship. His iconography spread throughout the house, in etchings, wood carvings, decorations on the shelves, the walls, the mantelpiece in the lounge. Antlers everywhere. Antlers and flames.  
  
Der Feuerstelle might have been Harrow’s house, but it was The Horned King who truly reigned. The daemon’s presence was intoxicating. Harrow’s followers hung on his every word, and leapt at the chance to please him, no matter what his demands. Petty theft. Robbery. Arson. Kidnapping. Assault. It didn’t matter. Harrow spoke, and his disciples obeyed.  
  
He was the king of Der Feuerstelle. A narcissistic criminal whose pockets swelled with blood money while lovestruck addicts clawed at his feet.  
  
And Marta was the one who gave Glory the invitation.  
  
Marta was Glory’s gateway drug.  
  
Glory was special. She climbed the ranks much as Marta did, and soon found herself counted among Harrow’s inner circle. Glory commanded respect from the acolytes, and soon became charged with carrying out Harrow’s will on expeditions outside the lodge.  
  
If Marta was the matriarch, then Glory was the muscle. Together, they formed the pillars of the household.  
  
But then something went wrong.  
  
Glory went out on an expedition and never came back. And with Glory missing, Harrow’s influence began to crack. No one knew why Glory had suddenly disappeared; or if they did, no one was saying anything. Some of Harrow’s followers proposed that they search for Glory, Marta foremost among them.  
  
But there was no search.  
  
Harrow set aside a room of the lodge, placed a shining stone on an altar and declared the room off-limits.  
  
And, just like that, the whispers of dissent grew silent.  
  
“I don’t remember much after that,” Marta said, her expression clouded. “There’s just a heat, and this stinging feeling, like smoke getting into your eyes. Anyway. A year ago, Glory returned to Feuerstelle with a shadowrunner named Poplar. They purified the spirit that Harrow had press-ganged. That snapped me out of my… trance, I guess. They broke us out; me and the kids that were still around. Glory went back to Berlin. I went to join the Sisters. And, well. You know the rest.”  
  
David sat, pensive, his fingers steepled. Marta watched him, wary. She was waiting for the judgment; waiting for the surprise, the outrage, anything. She was waiting, anxiously, for David to react to the years of messy, damning history she’d all-but-vomited onto his lap. She was waiting for him to berate her; to call her stupid, gullible, desperate, foolish.  
  
He didn’t say any of that. He didn’t say anything; only met Marta’s eyes in the dark, and kept his maddening quiet.  
  
David opened his mouth, as if to say something. Marta leaned forward, expectant. David slumped in his seat. He closed his mouth and heaved a sigh.  
  
“Man…” David’s caught Marta’s gaze. “That’s some fucked up shit.”  
  
Marta barked a laugh, despite everything. “...Yeah. I’m- I’m sorry to just dump that on you all at once. I just thought you needed to know.”  
  
David smiled. “It’s fine. For your part, I think you needed to tell it.”  
  
Marta grinned in return. David was right. In her time at the abbey, she’d only divulged her checkered past as a cult matriarch in bits and pieces, hiding behind imperfect memory and ambiguity. There was something truly refreshing about being able to lay the truth bare.  
  
She’d known David for scarcely a day, but Marta thought he could be a friend. He made for a decent enough confessor, at any rate.  
  
Marta shivered. Marta wasn’t sure what she’d expected David to say, but he’d taken her impromptu honesty hour completely in stride. Her anxiety left her in sighs, in smiles, only lingering in the tips of her fingers.  
  
“What about you?” Marta asked, shuffling her Tarot deck if only to occupy her restless hands. “What’s your story?”  
  
“Well, shit,” David shrugged. “I don’t have anything like all that. Honestly, I’m kinda boring. Even my aura’s boring. You can read me, if you want.”  
  
“Can I, really?”  
  
“Yeah. No skin off my nose.”  
  
Marta exhaled, sliding into astral space. David’s aura unfurled before her, a pale, smoky gray, threaded with luminescent gold. His magical potential coiled around him like smoke, only coalescing into two distinct spells: the ability to heal minor wounds, and the ability to sharpen one’s aim. Even these two spells didn’t crystallize in his aura like they would a professional, textbook mage. Self-taught, then. Intuitive. Adaptive. He could be an Air magus in the making, if he could get the proper training.  
  
“I’m nothing special,” David was saying, as Marta returned to realspace. “I’ve got a few drops of magic in me, but that’s never paid my bills. I never had any real aptitude for book learning, but I’m in decent shape, and I’ve got decent aim, so I went for a career in CorpSec. I was there almost ten years. I was even on track for a position at Knight Errant. But…”  
  
“But?”  
  
David let out a breath. “...I quit.”  
  
Marta blinked. “Why?”  
  
“I don’t know,” David shrugged. “It just sort of… happened. That’s when I went freelance, and moved to Halcyon City. I packed up my gear, my coat, my car, and tried to make it on my own.”  
  
David smiled, rueful. “It didn’t work out as well as I hoped. I was broke for a while. But there weren’t so many contracts, and there wasn’t as much fine print and corporate PR to sift through. So that was a plus. And, well… I got by. More or less.”  
  
Marta nodded. “So how did you meet Glory?”  
  
“Glory saved my life,” David said softly. He broke into a grin. “Well, more like she _spared_ my life. I was on a job, guarding some little cabin in the woods. Easy money, standing on a porch and taking in the air. Turns out I should’ve looked into my client more carefully. They were there laying the groundwork for a Firepact cell.”  
  
Marta cringed. “...Yikes.”  
  
“Yeah, ‘yikes’,” David snorted. “So imagine my surprise when Glory charges out of the woods to kick our goddamn teeth in. Blows out a guy’s chest with a high caliber revolver round. Uses her claws to tear two other guys to shreds. Only spared me, I can imagine, because I asked nicely- in other words, begging and damn near pissing myself. I still wound up getting kicked into a tree because I said something stupid. Blacked out for a bit. When I came to, she was gone.” David shook his head. “Just left bodies behind.”  
  
“I’m sorry,” Marta said.  
  
“Don’t be _too_ sorry,” David said. “Sergeant Castor was alright, but the other two guys were dicks. Besides, we were rent-a-cops. Mercenaries. Mercs who make it to retirement are one in a million.”  
  
Marta nodded. She shuffled her Tarot deck, somber.  
  
“Anyway,” David said, breezing past. “I ran into Glory again on another job. That night, if you can believe it. Long story short: she saved my life for real, that time. And then she offered me a job. As her bodyguard, which, y’know, only gets more laughable the more I see her fight.”  
  
“Still,” Marta smiled in gratitude. “I’m glad you were with her, even for a little bit. With how much danger she’s been in, with who knows many people coming after her… I hate the thought of Glory facing that alone.”  
  
“But she’s not alone, is she?” David asked. “She has you.”  
  
Marta’s Tarot deck slipped from her fingers. Her cards scattered across the floor, a flush coloring her cheeks.  
  
“That’s…” Marta bristled, crossing her arms across her chest. “...I don’t know what you mean by that.”  
  
“Oh boy,” David sighed. He started gathering up the fallen cards. “Look. I’m sorry. I know it’s none of my business. But, if you’d like my unsolicited opinion-”  
  
“Which I don’t.”  
  
“-I think you should tell her.”  
  
Marta’s expression softened. She sighed, picking cards up off the floor.  
  
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Marta murmured.  
  
“I think you two are adults,” David said, “and it’s better to have stuff like this out in the open instead of letting it keep you in knots.”  
  
David handed her his pile of cards. Marta took them, muttering muted thanks.  
  
David sighed. He reached out, snagging one last card that had slipped under the cot they were using as a table.  
  
“Why did you go with Glory?” Marta asked.  
  
“Honestly? A job is a job,” David admitted. “Nothing personal. But it’s personal for you, and for Glory, too. I don’t know this Harrow guy, but he sounds like a real scumbag. He sounds like he deserves every bit of karma coming his way. So if I can help you guys make that happen, I will. In the meantime, I’ll be happy just getting by.”  
  
“That’s all?” Marta wondered. “If you just wanted to make a living, you could have stayed in CorpSec. I’m sure that’d be a more comfortable life. If you stay here, you’ll be a fugitive. Is that what you want?”  
  
David shrugged. “You could’ve stayed with the Sisters, helped Sister Shelley rebuild the church. The Firepact’s gunning for Glory. Once she left the city, you’d have been safe- now you’re a fugitive, too. Why did _you_ stay?”  
  
“Glory’s my-” Marta bit her lip. “... _friend_. I couldn’t let her do this alone. But you don’t know her, David. The Firepact is dangerous. What if you get hurt? What if you get killed? You don’t owe her anything.”  
  
“Yes, I do,” David said. “She saved my life, remember?”  
  
“I just…” Marta sighed. “I just don’t want you to _die_ for her.”  
  
“Wouldn’t you?”  
  
Marta paused. She looked at the floor, shuffling her Tarot deck.  
  
“I’m a mercenary, Marta,” David said softly. “I know the numbers. Chances are I won’t retire. I could die working in CorpSec, or for Knight Errant, or as a freelancer. I could die, no matter who my boss is. But what Glory’s trying to do… I don’t know. I want to do this. This feels like something big. Something important. I haven’t known her as long as you have, but I know she’s someone worth following. Even into Hell.”  
  
Marta nodded. David handed her the card that had fallen under the table. She held it up to the light- an eight-spoked wheel, so like a compass, with no mortal hand to guide it.  
  
The Wheel of Fortune. Circumstance. Change. The hands of fate, spinning out of mortal control.  
  
“I don’t think Glory needs a bodyguard,” David said. “But I think she needs you.”  
  
Marta took a deep breath. She swallowed. Nodded.  
  
“Thank you,” she breathed. “I’ll-”  
  
Marta paused as a strong breeze buffeted the cabin, carrying the scent of coming rain. The back door swayed open. A figure slipped inside before the door closed again, a shadow in the dim light.  
  
Glory.  
  
“You’re back,” Marta blinked. “Where did you go?”  
  
Glory decided not to disclose that she had briefly stepped outside to escape bad memories, and then been promptly preoccupied by a stray cat that was wandering through the undergrowth.  
  
“I got distracted,” Glory said flatly. “Now’s not the time. Get down. Mr. Wen, the road.”  
  
Marta tucked away her Tarot deck and fell flat onto her stomach. David crept up to the window and peeked outside. They could hear it; the sound of engines, of tires creaking over pavement. The sound grew louder, got closer, before it faded into the distance.  
  
“Damn it,” David muttered. “Two vehicles. Red pickup. White van. Damn well the same ones from before.”  
  
“Pack your things,” Glory ordered. “We’ve stayed here too long.”  
  
~*~  
  
The rain came, haltingly at first, then all at once. It came down in fat, wet drops, turning the ground into mire in a matter of minutes.  
  
Marta, for her part, was untouched by rain. Since abandoning the Horned King as the source of her magic, her affinity for water meant she didn’t have to worry about getting wet. A bubble of Marta’s magic kept the driving rain at bay. David and Glory were grateful; but they still weren’t _too_ comfortable, perched as they were in the boughs of a tree.  
  
“Four guys on foot,” David reported, squinting through his rifle scope. “Hunting dogs. Five, maybe six. There’s something up with their eyes. A glow, like fire. So, I’m guessing hellhounds.”  
  
“Fun,” Glory muttered.  
  
“The rain will cover our sound and our scent,” Marta chimed in. “It’s not too late for us to just give them the slip. We can circle behind them, get back to the car, and get out of here before they make it back to their vans.”  
  
“No,” Glory shook her head. “We slip away now, they’ll just be back on us later. We stop this tonight.”  
  
Glory turned, her eyes glinting in the dim light.  
  
“Marta, can you shroud this location?”  
  
“Yes,” Marta nodded, “but the dogs are magically active. They’ll sense us hiding, even if they can’t see us.”  
  
“The shroud will still keep the hunters from getting a shot off,” Glory said. She dropped to the ground with a splash, flicking out her hand razors.  
  
“Stay here,” Glory said, glancing up at Marta. “Stay safe. This shouldn’t take long.”  
  
“But-”  
  
“Don’t worry about me,” Glory smiled in her eyes, not quite reaching her mouth. “Just stay close to David until we get this done.”  
  
Marta opened her mouth, then closed it again. She sighed. “...Alright.”  
  
“Mr. Wen? The dogs, if you please.”  
  
“You got it, boss.”  
  
Marta took a deep breath and sighed. Pale blue power gathered at her fingertips and coalesced in a glyph around the base of their tree, hiding them from view. David shouldered his rifle and swept his aim, while Glory turned, coat-tails flaring in the wind, and strode out into the storm…  
  
~*~  
  
Two hunters picked their way through the mud and the muck, rifles tucked under their arms, cheap plastic ponchos flapping in the wind. Their pack of hunting dogs had vanished ahead of them into the woods. With the fog, and the pounding rain, if not for their incessant barking, they would’ve lost track of them already.  
  
“Shitty day for a hunt,” one of them muttered, boots sloshing through the sodden undergrowth.  
  
“Pay’s gonna be worth it,” his partner replied. “The boys are gonna have steak tomorrow.”  
  
“Yeah, and if the fuckin’ _dogs_ are having steak, imagine what _we’ll_ have,” the first hunter grinned. “We’ll have some fancy shit wrapped in gold foil. Whassat called? Pheasant.”  
  
“Man, there ain’t no pheasant ‘round here. They’re in, like, China.”  
  
“We’ll import it, then. We’ll have the money-”  
  
An explosion rocked the woods, and the two hunters snapped to attention, their rifles shouldered, peering through their scopes and into the dark. The edges of a red-hot fireball curled into the air, rising above the trees. Seconds later, it happened again: a sharp bang, like a grenade going off, and a curl of flame and smoke.  
  
“D’you see ‘em?” the hunter hissed, urgent.  
  
“Man, I don’t see a damn thing.”  
  
And he really couldn’t. In the dark, and the fog, and the rain, there was nothing in those woods but the glow of distant fires and the shadow in the trees.  
  
Movement. Splashing footsteps, flashing steel-  
  
The hunter went rigid, reaching for his throat, fingertips hooked and numb. His blood fountained into the air in a ghastly mist, damped down by the rain.  
  
His partner swiveled and took his shot. Strong hands jerked his rifle up, and he fired over the phantom’s shoulder. The butt of his rifle slammed back into his sternum, the impact jarring it from his grip. It swung up and cracked him in the chin. He fell to one knee, and had his neck broken by a home-run swing.  
  
Glory dropped the rifle in the mud and kept on running.  
  
~*~  
  
The hellhound was huge, by dog standards. It was an English mastiff before its Awakening, already one of the biggest dog breeds out there. But when its spark ignited, its dormant magic transformed it into a beast- a three-foot tall battering ram, corded with muscle, glowing with magma beneath its skin. In realspace, it was a shadow through the trees, only given away by its eyes, smoldering like hot coals. In astral space, its aura, fire-red, blazed like a torch.  
  
Three rifle rounds punched into its body and cut its thread, its aura going dark. In realspace, its body did the opposite- it exploded in a huge, bright ball of fire and cooked meat, its volatile metabolism erupting in some catastrophic, arcane reaction.  
  
David exhaled, adjusting his scope. He slid back into astral space, hunting for targets, seeking the bright lights in the charcoal dark.  
  
“Is it always like this?” Marta asked from her perch, while David fired another aimed burst that set a hellhound off like a bomb. “You watching from a distance, while Glory’s out there, in the thick of things?”  
  
“In theory,” David said. He dropped another distant hellhound, its dying explosion throwing up mud and steam. “I mean, I’ve only been working for her for, like, four days. But that’s the plan. More or less.”  
  
“I see.”  
  
David glanced back at her, his vision sliding back into realspace. Marta was a shadow beside him, stricken and pale in the dim, misted light.  
  
“...Hey. She’s gonna be fine,” David said gently. He clicked out his empty rifle magazine, reaching into his coat for a fresh one. “You’ve seen Glory fight, haven’t you? She’s a monster. She can take care of herself.”  
  
“I know,” Marta murmured. “I just… wish she didn’t have to.”  
  
Marta suddenly grabbed David’s arm. He looked up, sliding a new magazine into his rifle.  
  
“What is it?” David wondered.  
  
Marta didn’t know. But she could feel it. A tremor at the edge of her aura. A distortion. A whistling-  
  
Marta kicked off the branch she was standing on and shoved David off his perch.  
  
Three magical bolts slammed into her and exploded in a plume of flame.  
  
~*~  
  
Glory ducked behind a tree an instant before a high-powered round tore a chunk out of the wood. She drew her revolver and coiled out of cover, firing into the dark. Two shots blew out chips of tree bark. The third yanked the hunter off his feet like a bad actor being pulled off stage.  
  
A bolt of magic exploded against the tree beside her, gutting its trunk in a burst of flame. The tree toppled over in a cloud of sparks and splinters, nearly severed at the waist.  
  
Glory ducked out of the path of the falling tree, only to spot a hellhound bearing down on her, charging through the mud. Fire gathered in its mouth, trailing embers in its wake.  
  
Glory spun around the bolt of magic the hellhound vomited in her direction. It seared past the small of her back and exploded against a tree behind her. The hound leapt at her, and Glory followed through with a spinning kick that pancaked the beast against a tree trunk.  
  
Glory shot it in the chest. It exploded against the tree, its arcane metabolism igniting like a firework.  
  
Glory jerked to the side, spun by torque. A hellhound’s jaws clamped around her wrist. Its weight and momentum wrenched her arm around, the heavy impact forcing her to the ground.  
  
Glory cried out in pain as she hit the muddy ground. She rolled to her feet, shaking her arm, but the beast had sunk its teeth into her augmetic musculature and would not let go. Glory grimaced and plunged her claws into its heart.  
  
The beast glowed white, and then exploded in her face.  
  
Glory dragged herself up out of the mud, dizzy with pain and fatigue. She clutched her stricken arm to her chest, the augmetics straining. An organic arm, she knew, would have been broken and dislocated, or worse.  
  
In the distance, Glory heard the frenzied barking of more hellhounds. Just how many of these damn things were there?  
  
“David, I need you to take care of these dogs,” Glory said into her comm.  
  
Glory coughed, gagging on soot. She tapped her commlink.  
  
“David?”  
  
~*~  
  
David hit the ground with a splash, his ears ringing. He should’ve known. The first rule of astral space: if you can see them, they can see you. And Marta was a Mage, more powerful than he was by a country mile. No wonder they’d be drawn to-  
  
“Marta,” David breathed, falling to his knees beside her. Marta was sprawled on the muddy ground, haloed by the burning skeleton of the tree beside them. For someone caught in an explosion, she was remarkably, surprisingly intact.  
  
Marta coughed, and blinked, her vision settling. She sat up in David’s grasp, the shimmering traces of a pale blue barrier lingering in the air around them. Her fingertips brushed against the icon of Venus hanging from her neck.  
  
“Thank you, Hecate,” Marta smiled.  
  
David blinked. “Who?”  
  
Marta abruptly pulled David behind her, her fingertips shining blue.  
  
A dozen bolts of fire sailed through the air towards them. At Marta’s command, a wall of water rose up to meet them. They struck the barrier and exploded into wisps of steam.  
  
Through the swirling water of Marta’s barrier, they could see the pack approaching: another half dozen hellhounds, their handlers undoubtedly close behind.  
  
The pickup truck and the white van from before. The ones that had passed their cabin twice. It hadn’t been the same ones, after all; there were two teams. Two hunting parties. And just because they managed to get the drop on the first one didn’t mean they were ready for the second.  
  
David swore under his breath. He shouldered his waterlogged rifle, misfired, and swore again.  
  
“Marta,” David began, slinging his rifle over his shoulder. The pack was closing in. “Can you gather all the water on the ground into one big puddle, deep enough that the hellhounds can’t just run through it? And can you do that while making sure the two of us stay totally dry?”  
  
Marta swallowed. Nodded. “I think so. Why?”  
  
David drew his pistol and racked the slide, a soft blue glow coming from the base of the grip. “No reason.”  
  
Glyphs traced themselves in the air around Marta’s hands. Magic thrummed in the air, the rain and water around them standing to attention, heeding her silent voice.  
  
Six hellhounds broke through the treeline. They charged forward in a frenzy, jaws trailing spittle and embers, scenting Marta’s magic in the air like blood in water. Marta’s wave surged around their feet. Their charge slowed to a trot, then a crawl, and finally, a paddle, as the water rose around them and they couldn’t simply run on through. The wave held them, halted in their tracks.  
  
In a circle around David and Marta’s feet, the soil became parched and pale.  
  
David fired.  
  
The gel-tipped phasic rounds burst as they struck the surface of Marta’s wave. Azure lightning cascaded through the pool, surging into the pack of hunting dogs. They shivered, convulsed, and went still, weeping smoke and steam from their singed bodies.  
  
Marta exhaled, and released her hold on the wave. The water receded back into the muddy earth, and for a moment, the only sound was the patter of rain.  
  
David turned to her and grinned.  
  
The rifle round punched through his chest in a spray of red.  
  
David staggered. He took two halting steps forward. Marta caught him in her arms, fear rooting her in place. She stared down at the ragged hole in the back of his coat, looked up and saw the shadow in the trees.  
  
The spent shell fell by the hunter’s foot. He slid the bolt back in place, took aim-  
  
His shot exploded off of Glory’s shoulder in a burst of chipped ceramite and sparking metal. She let the force of the shot spin her around. She drew her revolver, took aim, and fired.  
  
~*~  
  
Their healing power merged together, the scent of honeysuckle and tilled earth mingling with that of seafoam and rain.  
  
David gasped awake, coughing. He sat up too fast, clutching his head when the dizziness hit him. He groaned, prodding at the frayed hole in his shirt and the unbroken skin beneath.  
  
“Oh, man,” David muttered. “If I had a nickel…”  
  
“You’d have two nickels,” Glory said.  
  
“Three if you count the stun round,” David smiled, despite everything.  
  
Glory helped David to his feet with her good arm, clutching the other to her chest. Already, the soft green glow of the Heart’s healing power was coiling like climbing ivy around the damaged limb. He glanced behind her, to where Marta was lingering close at hand.  
  
“Everyone alright?” David asked.  
  
“Compared to you?” Marta asked.  
  
“Fair.” David shrugged.  
  
“Come on,” Glory said. “There’s something you should see.”  
  
David made his way over to the last of the fallen hunters, leaning on Marta for support. The hunter was lying in a puddle, bleeding out from a shot to his stomach courtesy of Glory. Blood darkened the mud around him. The man lifted his head and glowered at the trio. David’s lips curled in disgust.  
  
“You shot my dogs, boy,” Mr. Wilk spat.  
  
“Well, you shot me,” David grumbled. “So I guess we’re even.”  
  
David searched for the tell-tale glint of fire in Mr. Wilk’s eyes, but found nothing. He exhaled.  
  
“He wasn’t enthralled,” Glory said flatly. “None of them were. If they were, the Rose Compass would have sensed something, before.”  
  
David gritted his teeth.  
  
“Every man has his price,” David said, his voice cold.  
  
“Don’t you judge me, boy,” Mr. Wilk said, pulling himself up to his elbows. “I’m just a man trying to make a living. To provide for his family. You’re a mercenary too, boy, or did you forget? A job is a job. You would’ve done the same.”  
  
“Would I?” David asked. He reached into the mud and pulled out Mr. Wilk’s hunting rifle. He examined the scope, drew back the bolt, then slid it back into place.  
  
For a moment, Marta thought David might shoot him. Instead, David simply slipped the rifle into a canvas sleeve on his back and walked away.  
  
“...Little vulture,” Mr. Wilk spat, indignant.  
  
“Business expense,” Glory shrugged. She turned and left him there in the mud, Marta following at her heels.    
  
~*~  
  
The rain cleared, but the mood stayed sour. They drove just long enough to put their encounter with the hunting party behind them, before they stopped and found somewhere to make camp.  
  
David, normally the most talkative of the three, was quiet the whole way. When they stopped to make camp, he disappeared into the tent and fell asleep almost immediately. Driving must have worn him out, Marta thought. That, or being shot in the back just a few hours before.  
  
Marta sat on an uncomfortably moist log, shuffling her Tarot deck to steady her fingers. Briefly, she considered using her magic to dry it out. But after summoning that wave against the charge of hellhounds, re-casting the concealment spell on David’s car, and, most importantly, subconsciously shielding herself from that explosion…  
  
Marta sighed. She was spent; magically, physically, mentally.  
  
But when Glory took a seat beside her, her heart still skipped a beat.  
  
“I can keep watch,” Glory said, flexing her still-recovering arm. “You should get some rest. That tent is really only big enough for two, anyway.”  
  
“I’m okay,” Marta said.  
  
“Suit yourself.”  
  
Marta exhaled, gazing up at the sky. The clouds were clearing, and the moon was shining through.  
  
“So this is what you do?” Marta asked quietly. “This is what you’ve _been_ doing, for all this time?”  
  
“Yeah. More or less.”  
  
Marta shuffled her Tarot deck, her fingers still trembling. “All this… danger. All this fear, and bloodshed. And for what? Nothing. Nothing but your own survival.”  
  
“Sometimes surviving is the best you can do,” Glory said, her eyes distant.  
  
“I can’t believe this,” Marta said. “All this time, while I’ve been at the abbey growing tomatoes and ladling out soup for the homeless, you’ve been fighting. You’ve been getting back at the Firepact, punishing them for what they did to you. For what…"  
  
Marta swallowed hard.  
  
“...for what _I_ did to you.”  
  
Glory shook her head. “It wasn’t you. It was the daemon.”  
  
“Not in the beginning,” Marta pressed. “I fell for Harrow. No magic involved. I ate up his lies. And then I turned around and did the same thing to you.”  
  
Glory exhaled through her nose, staring blankly ahead. Her silence was agonizing.  
  
“Glory,” Marta asked, her throat tight. “Do you… hate me?”  
  
Glory took a deep breath.  
  
“A little,” Glory admitted. The words turned Marta’s insides to ice. “If you had never found me on the street, I wouldn’t be where I am now. I wouldn’t be hunting Harrow down, fighting off Firepact assassins at every step. I wouldn’t even have these,” Glory said, holding up her cyber-arms.  
  
“...So… yes. Part of me hates you. A small part. I can’t not, after everything that’s happened.”  
  
Marta’s voice was tight. “...I understand.”  
  
“But,” Glory continued, “I’m glad you’re safe. I’m glad you’re here with me, Marta. And I’m glad you got out.”  
  
“ _You_ got me out,” Marta whispered. “You broke me free of Harrow’s control. You saved those kids. You saved _me_. I…” Marta hesitated. “...I love you for that.”  
  
Glory stiffened. She fixed her gaze straight ahead, letting out a sigh.  
  
“...I think…” Glory said, choosing each word carefully. “...you may be confusing adrenaline for some other emotion.”  
  
She reached out, placing a hand over Marta’s. Beneath her cool touch, Marta’s shaking hands stilled. She exhaled, idly drawing the card from the top of the stack.  
  
A woman, bearing a sword in one hand and a set of scales in another, a blindfold around her eyes.  
  
Justice is blind. But so is love.  
  
It was the sign she needed. The courage she couldn’t find.  
  
“I love you, Glory,” Marta breathed. “I love you now, and I loved you then.”  
  
“What we had with Harrow was not love,” Glory warned.  
  
“I know,” Marta said. “He got in our heads, poisoned us to worship him- but what _we_ had was real. What we had was not the daemon’s doing. We’re not the same people we were before. We can try again.”  
  
Glory heaved a sigh, squeezing Marta’s hand in hers.  
  
“Do you really believe that, Marta?”  
  
Their eyes met in the dark- brown and amber, ringed with red- both of them touched by fire, but neither one consumed. There was still some blood flecked on Glory's cheek, light enough that one might hope they were freckles. Marta didn't care. None of that mattered right now.   
  
Marta summoned the last of her courage. She traced a fingertip down Glory’s cheek, and curled her hand beneath her chin.   
  
“Believe this,” Marta whispered.  
  
They were so close. They were haloed in moonlight; wreathed in rain.  
  
All that lay between them was just an inch of indecision.  
  
And very soon after, not even that.  
  
~*~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things never stay quiet for as long as you would like. At any rate, I hope you enjoyed this chapter, and I hope you'll all forward to the next one. Thanks for reading!


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